One company, many deals is a one-to-many relationship. Typically you would
use a numeric CompanyID field to identify the company, and therefore a
linking field of the same type. If CompanyID is Autonumber, the linking
field in the related table is Number (Long Integer). Names are subject to
change, which means you will need to update the related table when that
happens.
An example of many-to-many is Students and Courses. One Student may take
many Courses, and one Course may be attended by many Students. A third table
is needed to resolve the relationship. In your case, unless a deal may apply
to many companies you have a one-to-many as described in my first paragraph.
As I mentioned, an Option Group is bound to a numeric field. Each of the
option buttons (they can be radio buttons, toggle buttons, or check boxes)
has an Option Value (set on the Property Sheet for the control).
You could have a table for Market Sectors.
tblSector
SectorID (numeric primary key, or PK)
Sector
Each sector is a separate record.
Best would be to create a simple form bound to tblSector (or a query based on
tblSector). As the Default Value property of the text box bound to SectorID:
=Nz(DMax("SectorID","tblSector"),0) + 1
This will number the records sequentially, starting with 1.
The Option Values of the option buttons are numbered to correspond to the
SectorID values in tblSector. Once that is done there are a number of ways
to display the corresponding Sector (text) value. For instance, in a text
box on the form, set the Control Source to:
=DLookup("Sector","tblSector","SectorID = " & [CoSectorID])
The above assumes the option group is bound to a field named CoSectorID.
CoSectorID is the field on the main form's table in which you are storing the
option group number (i.e. the Option Value from the selected option button).
A sample table setup for the main table would be:
tblCompany
CompanyID (autonumber PK)
CompanyName
CoSectorID (Number field - long integer)
Address, etc.
Note that you do not need fields for each of the market sectors. That value
is being stored as a number in CoSectorID. The DLookup expression above
finds the Sector (text) value from the tblSector record in which SectorID is
the same as the Option Group value.
I've has a look at Allen Browne's page and Think I understand the concept but
am struggling a bit in relating it to my situation as I don't think I have a
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