I have an Access database that has already been created by someone who used to work at my job and the database seems to be working just fine, in a sense. The only thing that I think is not working is that the information in the tables and the forms are not linking. I want to know how to link my information from my tables, forms, queries, and reports all together so that I only have to delete one entry instead of going through and deleting each one in each section. Can you help?

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Answer from Richard Rost:

Data only exists in TABLES. What you see in the queries, forms, and reports are just "images" of that data.

If you have two tables, like customer and orders, that have related information, then you can set up a global database relationship between those two tables based on some related field (like CustomerID). Then, if you delete the customer from the customer table, the orders for that customer will automatically be deleted.

To do this, just turn on CASCADE DELETES in the relationships section. I cover this in my Access 220 tutorial:

http://www.599cd.com/site/courselist/access/access220/?key=BlFAlEx

I'm sure you can also Google instructions. Setting it up is slightly different depending on what version of Access you have.