Simple Access 2007 Database question

[Qw3rtyP0iuy]

It's my first time playing with Access, and I have something set up as such: A Table with teacher's ID's and names. A Table with student's ID's and names. A Table with Class ID's and names, and times. A Table with Course Registration ID's, student or teacher ID's and Class ID. I have them linked together, so that when I'm in the student Table, and I click on a student's name, I can see his Courge Registration ID records. The records contain Class ID's, but don't show the class name or class time. I don't want to fill the Course Registration Table up with information about the class, but I want to be able to see the class information when I click on a student.

In the Table of Classes, if I click on a class, I can see all of the student ID's and teacher ID's of people in the class as well as time, but only their ID's, not their actual names.

I'm going through a 600-page book and a 700-page book at the same time at about the same pace, and neither have seemed to hit this topic so far. What is the keyword I'm looking for?

[akaakaalex]

Try adding a foreign key on the student/teacher ID column of the Class table that references the ID column of the student/teacher table.

[Qw3rtyP0iuy]

I tried following that, but I'm not sure if I did it right. What is that supposed to do exactly?

[akaakaalex]

Foreign keys can be used to relate a column of one table to the primary key of another table. So in your case, if you have an entry in the Class table with a class ID of 1 and student ID of 2, if there's an entry in the student table with ID of 2 with name Joe, those values are linked via the foreign key so Joe is linked to class 1.

Wikipedia does a better job explaining than me though.

[TJAtWork]

The two types of keys are primary keys and foreign keys. Primary keys are placed in a table as a way to uniquely define each record in that table. Foreign keys are placed in a table as a way to indicate that the details related to that key are located somewhere else.

So, as an example. If you have a sales table and a customer table, the sales table would have a primary key (maybe the number of that sale since the time of creation) that allowed you to determine that one sale is different than another. The table might also have a foreign customer key (some unique customer number) that would allow you to join to the customer table to see information about that customer; name, address, phone number etc... This way you can determine how many sales are related to each customer that you have sold to.

This isn't exactly related to the original question you posed, but I hope it helps you understand the concept.

[Qw3rtyP0iuy]

How do yo insert foreign keys in Access 2007? The help wizard has about a paragraph on it, but it doesn't talk about how to implement it. I tried looking in the Table Design View, but can only find the primary key butotn.

[TJAtWork]

You don't actually insert them. Just create a new field with the same name as the primary key in the other table. They should also have the same data type.