First Timer: Product Inventory Table

I think we've addressed your original post by giving you a robust model as a basis for your application.  The form I included is a very basic interface, for inserting inventory data, but would be better implemented as a continuous subform within a products form, which would also include subforms for suppliers, colours and sizes.  I'll try and amend it and post back when I've done so.

You will need to add a form for inserting supplier data, and at present the model does not cater for events at all.  You'll find a ready source of support here as you develop the application.  However, I think you would be well advised to first invest some time in learning the basics of application development in Access.

Yes you have and I want to thank you so much for your consistent help. 

Still a little confused on the form things, but if you could amend that part that would be great. Just keep the relationship format as you had it. 

I will definitely take your advice and read up on the basics of application development. Your help has meant a lot and  is very much appreciated.

Again, thank you!

I've just uploaded the amended file to my SkyDrive folder.  You can now enter the colours, sizes and suppliers for a product in subforms in the main product form.  You can also enter new products of courses by going to a new record in the form.  You can also enter the inventory data for the product in the subform, so for a product in two sizes, and in two colours each size you'd enter four rows in the inventory subform, selecting the relevant size/colour combination in each case.

If you wish you can of course change the designs of the form and subforms I've created, amending the colour scheme, font sizes etc to suit yourself.  I've left them pretty basic.

You need to create a form based on the suppliers table for entering the full data for each supplier, but that should be straightforward enough and you can use the form wizard if you wish.

You'll also presumably need to tackle how to fit events into the database, but I'd need a more detailed description from you of how these relate to the products in real world terms to be sure of advising you correctly how to model them in database terms.

I'll figure events out later. 

2 Quick questions:

1. Why did you not enter  the products in the Inventory table? I've been staring at it wondering why you didn't do that. And how they magically appeared to already be in the system.
2. What is the purpose of the 'sub' forms? How will they benefit me? Will it help when I make reports?

Your two questions are linked.  When you embed a subform within a parent form it is linked to the parent form by the LinkMasterFields and LinkChildFields properties of the subform control.  It is this link which enables the subform to show only those rows which relate to the current row in the parent form.  When you insert a new row in a subform the linking mechanism automatically inserts the value of the parent form's table's primary key into the relevant foreign key column in the subform's table.  In this case the column is ProductID.  

Subforms are really just an interface implementation of the underlying relationships between the tables, and are the standard means of inserting data into related tables.  How else would you do it?  Data should certainly not be entered directly into tables.

The subform's per se won't help when you build reports, but the underlying relationships which they reflect will.   You can use subreports in a report in exactly the same way as a subform in a form, but often you will not need to, as you can base a report on a query which joins the tables on the keys, and group the report on the data from a referenced (parent) table so that that shows once only per group and the multiple values from a referencing (child) table show individually within each grouping.

These sort of things are the basic mechanics of how Access works, and something you do need to become familiar with if you are going to use Access to develop your own applications.  Like any task you first need to understand how to use the tools provided.