Northwind is totally changeable. However, I would use it for an example
and create your own along side of it. That way you can use your own
terms and it won't be so confusing for you down the line. And you can
always investigate into how they did things without breaking the
database. For instance if you start renaming fields in the tables, then
reports, queries and forms wont work correctly for you to see how
Microsoft did it.
I've seen people modify it and use it to track Students and their
grades. It can be done, but it is less confusing to see Student as
opposed to Customer. Therefore, I would recommend that the teacher
should have created a new database and a Student Table, following
basically the same structure.
Therefore, for a Healthcare Database, perhaps rather than a Customer
table, you may want a Patients table. You still may want a Products
Table, but it may also be a Products and Services table. Your
categories would still apply. You probably would not do anything with
Shippers. But Suppliers may be lest confusing if you called them
Vendors. I am sure that you may need additional tables.
One thing that Northwind does not do well is track Inventory Levels.
All the bones are there, but some pieces are missing to actually make it
work, so when you get there, you will want to post back to see how to
ensure that you can get an accurate physical inventory out of the
database.
Also, Microsoft did not perform good naming conventions for their
objects, nor did they normalize to the extent some other Access
developers do.
See:
Rules of Data Normalization -
http://www.datamodel.org/NormalizationRules.html
Naming Conventions -
http://personal-computer-tutor.com/abc2/v9/james9.htm
(BTW - Save yourself some grief and avoid spaces in
names of objects. For instance use CustomerFirstName instead of
Customer First Name. Because later on down the way, you will end up
having to type [Customer First Name] instead. While CustomerFirstName
can be used all over the place.)
I hope that helps.
Dawn Crosier
Application Specialist
"Education Lasts a Lifetime"
This message was posted to a newsgroup. Please post replies and
questions to the group so that others can learn as well.
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On
Behalf Of Payne, Steve
Sent: Thursday, February 02, 2006 4:06 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: RE: [ms_access] inventory and ordering access database
Well the this database will be used for healthcare order management.
Would northwind would work for us? is it easily changeable?
Sincrerely,
Steve Payne
202-361-9357 Phone
202-315-3768 Fax
www.steverpayne.com
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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