(no subject)

[senoritafish]

V. and I have been trying to convert a fairly simple dBASE program, the one I use to do the monthly landings update, into Access. V. is a bit more advanced than I am, but I am slowly catching up. We were making pretty good progress, but we can't figure out how to make Access do one thing that is fairly simple in dBASE. V. sent an email to our Access instructor we trained with, and there is a class being offered here next week so we can ask that instructor too. Until we figure that out, we are stymied. I think I might know a way around it, but it seems very roundabout, and there must be something simpler.

It's frustrating; in dBASE, I knew what the text command was, but I don't know Visual Basic and only the tiniest smidgen of SQL, so trying figure out what to do though menus and buttons is laborious. I need to take a full-on semester type class, I guess; these two-days training courses the state gives just don't cover enough, especially when they don't want us traveling because of the budget, and training given in my area is about 5 months between levels. I can always take the online courses, but if I need to ask a question, there's nobody to ask.

Comments

[metalmensch.livejournal.com]

What exactly is it that you're trying to make access do? I'm fairly versed in that POS program. :)

[senoritafish.livejournal.com]

Cool! I was really just venting, but great if you can help!

I'm still kind of a beginner at Access, so forgive me if this gets long winded. I have two tables that I have merged into one. They both have the fields Month, Day and Boat. Records from the first table may or may not have a match in the second table (by those fields only, other fields may be different) and visa versa. When the table is indexed on those records, matches will appear one under the other. If records from the second table have a match in the first, I want them to drop out. If they don't, I want to keep them. All records from the first table are retained whether they have a match or not. dBASE has a command:

Index on str(Month)+str(Day)+str(Boat) tag Sorted Unique

where, if you are indexing on those three fields, it will look through the table and only list the first occurrence of records with those matching fields. If I try to do this in Access through a query, and if I use Group By, or set the query properties to either Unique Record or Unique Value, Access looks at all the fields in the record, sees that fields other than the ones being indexed have different values, and returns every single record back to me. How do I get it to return only the first occurrence of those fields being indexed? The Find Duplicate and Find Unmatched queries don't work, because the records aren't exactly the same, and the same thing happens.

Maybe I'm dense, but I don't see the difference between Unique Value and Unique Record, because they are both looking at every field in the record.

This is probably something really simple that I am just overlooking. And I'm probably going about the hard way

[senoritafish.livejournal.com]

Hello?

(hears echoes)

Did I scare you?