Question : Access Database Design: 1 Field Tables as Primary Key

Hi,

I've been stump on this question for a long time and thus have avoided Access, but now I'm being forced to use it at my new job and hope someone can provide some clarification on building a database.

I have a survey which has to be sent out to 10 regions (for example) . Each region fills out a survey which has:

3 Groups (such as Internet, Mail, Over the Phone) in which each of these Group has 3 subgroups such as Domestic, Foreign, Other, with each of these subgroups have a mutually exclusive categories such as (pens, notebooks,staples) for Mail, (ipad, iphones, itouch) for Over the Phone) etc.

I created something in Excel where I can pull all the raw data from the survey and complie it onto a seperate worksheet to be manually imported to into Access.


From my understanding of database design, I should seperate each of the groups/subgroups/categoy into 3 separate tables to avoid repeating data

tblGroup (1 field named Group which is also pk)
tblSubGroup(1 field named SubGroup which is also pk)
tblCategory (1 field named Category which is also pk)

then make a table tblSurvey with the fields
Region
Group
SubGroup
Category

and have the primary key as a composite key between all 4 fields and linking the relationship between the other 3 tables respectively. From this tblSurvey, I would list out every possible acceptable combination allowed from the survey.

My question is, am I doing this correctly? Should I not be creating 3  tables (Groups/SubGRoups/Category) with just 1 field?  Should I have a 2nd field called "id" where a numeric (non autonumbered) value be used to reference the attributes in each table and have the junction  table  tblSurvey be composed of all numeric values such as

Region 1
Group: 2
SubGroup: 3
Category: 5

where
Region 1 = Northeast
Group 2 = Electronic
Subgroup 3 = Domestic
Category 5 = pen

Thanks for taking the time to read the above. I know I don't have all the teriminology down which makes it harder to comprehend my exact needs but any suggestion would be greatly appreciated. Thanks all.

Answer : Access Database Design: 1 Field Tables as Primary Key

I prefer using comboxes.  Please see the updated form in the attached database.

Q-26429183.mdb (356 KB)  (File Type Details) 

sample