Values not showing in Access form combo box

Question

I have an application in Access 2003 that I am working on. In it, I have an employee table, which is connected to two other tables. The two connected tables are tables that hold a few fixed KeyWords. In my main employee table, I just have the ID from the other table, rather than having the whole word.

I wanted to make a form for entering data into these tables, so I made a query from the three tables that shows the all the regular fields of the employee table except instead of those two ID's, I showed the words themselves.

I then made the form and set the query as the RecordSource. The fields that have keywords are Combo boxes on my form, and their ControlSource is the keyword field from the query (like I mentioned earlier, the value can only be one keyword out of a list). Now, the problem I face is this: When I want to see a single record, it shows the correct value in the ComboBox, but when dropdown the menu, it doesnt show any of the other values.

What is the best way to do this? Am I doing this in the wrong way?

Thank you

Answer 1

I'd approach this slightly differently, set the combo box Row Sources to include both the id and text fields (you can hide the ID column if required by setting it's width to zero). Now add the ID fields to the employee query; you shouldn't need to join the other tables to the Employee table in this query, these fields are foreign keys and the combo boxes should show the text for you automatically. Set the form Record Source to this query, now set the combo box Control Source to the appropriate ID value from the form Record Source.

If you let the wizard build a form for you based on the Employee table you will see this approach in action.