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ms-accessentity-relationship

ms access: how to deal with messy relationship diagram


I'm working on a project with a lot of different entities and as the project goes, my entity relationship diagram becomes more and more messy.

I've been adamant at re-arranging the diagram but it has got to a point where there's not much I can do to have it look clean.

See this picture (and in the end there's going to be even more tables)

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/59/capturepna.png/

Is there any tool I can use to auto-arrange the tables in an optimized way or something the like?


Solution

  • You can make zoomed in views of the relationships. I know it is nice to see the entire universe of your data structure at once, but once your creation evolves into a complex organism, you can't comprehend all its DNA at once, anyhow.

    Try clearing your tables and then selecting the tables for which you want to see the relationship. If you want to see the relationship between managers and employees, you don't need Orders, Products, etc visible.

    Also, you can save your "view" by clicking on Relationship Report in the design section of the Relationships screen (assuming you're using Access 2007 or better).