Bonnie asks: "How do you handle contacts that are couples? Mr & Mrs Tom Kelly want to be known as such (or as Jane and Tom). Their donations are in both their names, as is their subscription. What I have read about nominalization seems to advise again Name1 and Name2 (or some such field arrangement). I have thought of a family/househouse table linked to individual contact tables. I have thought of a field AddressMailTo and MakeReceiptTo (in case it is to both or only one of the couple). Their donations are not normally only his or hers, and their subscription is often to Mr & Mrs or to Jane and Tom – but how to organize this well in a database?"

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There are MANY different way to handle this, and it all depends on YOUR needs. Yes, normalization in a PERFECT database would advise against having Name1 and Name2 in a single table. HOWEVER, if you're sure that's all you're ever going to need, then I don't see a problem with it. I would have:

Title1, FirstName1, LastName1, Title2, FirstName2, LastName2

This way your database could have data to cover situations where each person could have a unique title such as Mr, Mrs, Miss, Dr, Father, Reverend, Rabbi, etc. Plus you're also covered in the event that the wife has a different last name as the husband (which does happen) or is perhaps even hyphenated with her maiden name.

As far as a salutation goes, this gets tricky. You need a LOT of logic to figure it out automatically OR you could just have ANOTHER field in your database to store that. This way, you can type in whatever it needs to be. Is this perfectly normalized? No. Not really... and you have to make sure you update it if one of the constituant fields changes, but it's more flexible this way. Once you get into EVENT programming, you could make an AfterUpdate event (covered in my 300-level classes) that automatically updates it... but you can always add that down the road.

Yes, a PERFECT normalized database would have a FamilyT table and then a PersonT table with a FamilyID so you could have as many people in the family as you want. HOWEVER, most families have either 1 or 2 primary people that you want to address mail to. The rest are children (and if you want to track them, you could always add the secondary table too).

This is just MY opinion. If you're a beginner to intermediate user and don't want to go through the headache of setting up a perfectly normalized database, don't worry about it at this point. You can always change it later. But as I've always said... if this meets your needs, it's fine. It's the same argument I make about addresses in my databases. I usually have a BillTo and ShipTo address in one table. Is it perfectly normalized? No. You should IDEALLY make a separate table so you can have as many addresses as you want... BUT... it's perfectly useful for my business, and I've never had a need for a 3rd address.

Go with whatever works FOR YOU. Anybody else have a comment on this?

Here's an additional thread on this topic.