I'm designing a survey which will have a lot of drop down lists for foks to pick their choices, thus avoiding entry mistakes and making entry quicker for them.

I had originally created a million (ok about 25) "code" tables, one for each code type, such as "computer type", "vendor" or "language". I realized it would be more efficient to combine all of these into a "allcodes" table which has 3 fields, the codetype (i.e. what category of lookup code is it?), the actual code I'd previously assigned (00123, 00124, 00125 etc.) and a description field containing the name to be displayed on the drop down boxes. I figure I can then use a combination of codetype and code for my key fields in my data tables.

I'm not entirely sure how I want to do this and can't believe I'm inventing anything new. Do any of you have any samples/ideas to share or point me towards info on this approach... and if you think it's the right one ;^)!

MTIA,

Mandy