Need suggestion for "notes" functionality form

My app needs some functionality for adding notes. I have a text box for that
now with the notes being stored in the table with other date related to my
main records, but I need a date associated with a note when it's added, need
to be able to print all notes so the date is on the left side and the note is
on the right side, and need to be able to display all the current notes and
then be able to popup a form or something to add a new note which will then
be displayed with the others.

Is this something that should be done with just usual form tools/design or
should I try to use MS word? Is there a good way to handle this? Right now,
all I have is a text box to put notes in. No date is associated with the
notes and the only display formatting would be based on users adding blank
lines between notes in the text box.

There has to be a better solution but I don't know what direction to work
toward.

Thanks,
CW

If you want multiple notes by date, I would suggest you create a child
table specifically for the notes. The trick is, I would guess it would be
possible for more than one note to be entered on a given date. Therefore, I
would use Date and Time to mark the notes.
You don't say what the notes are associated with, so I will use Client as an
example.
For a Notes Table, you will need:

tblClientNotes
NOTE_ID - Autonumber pk
CLIENT_ID - Long, fk to Client table
NOTE_TIME - Date/Time
NOTE_TEXT - Memo

For this notes table, I would use a sub form. If you want to be able to
open a one record form with a large space for the memo, you could open that
by user selection displaying the current record from the subform.

When you create a new note record, use Now() as the Default Value for the
control bound to the NOTE_TIME field.

"Cheese_whiz" wrote:

My app needs some functionality for adding notes. I have a text box for that
now with the notes being stored in the table with other date related to my
main records, but I need a date associated with a note when it's added, need
to be able to print all notes so the date is on the left side and the note is
on the right side, and need to be able to display all the current notes and
then be able to popup a form or something to add a new note which will then
be displayed with the others.

Is this something that should be done with just usual form tools/design or
should I try to use MS word? Is there a good way to handle this? Right now,
all I have is a text box to put notes in. No date is associated with the
notes and the only display formatting would be based on users adding blank
lines between notes in the text box.

There has to be a better solution but I don't know what direction to work
toward.

Thanks,
CW

Klatuu,

thanks for the suggestion. I was kind of working on something exactly like
you suggested as an alternative, but it seems like there might be a better
way with word and I was not getting the type of resutls I wanted with what I
was doing.

After your suggestion that confirmed I was going about it in a reasonable
way, I ended up getting things to look pretty good.

Thanks again,
CW

"Klatuu" wrote:

If you want multiple notes by date, I would suggest you create a child
table specifically for the notes. The trick is, I would guess it would be
possible for more than one note to be entered on a given date. Therefore, I
would use Date and Time to mark the notes.
You don't say what the notes are associated with, so I will use Client as an
example.
For a Notes Table, you will need:

tblClientNotes
NOTE_ID - Autonumber pk
CLIENT_ID - Long, fk to Client table
NOTE_TIME - Date/Time
NOTE_TEXT - Memo

For this notes table, I would use a sub form. If you want to be able to
open a one record form with a large space for the memo, you could open that
by user selection displaying the current record from the subform.

When you create a new note record, use Now() as the Default Value for the
control bound to the NOTE_TIME field.

"Cheese_whiz" wrote:

My app needs some functionality for adding notes. I have a text box for that
now with the notes being stored in the table with other date related to my
main records, but I need a date associated with a note when it's added, need
to be able to print all notes so the date is on the left side and the note is
on the right side, and need to be able to display all the current notes and
then be able to popup a form or something to add a new note which will then
be displayed with the others.

Is this something that should be done with just usual form tools/design or
should I try to use MS word? Is there a good way to handle this? Right now,
all I have is a text box to put notes in. No date is associated with the
notes and the only display formatting would be based on users adding blank
lines between notes in the text box.

There has to be a better solution but I don't know what direction to work
toward.

Thanks,
CW