first question of many: linking forms

first question of many: linking forms

"I am not a programmer"

Nevertheless, I'm trying to replicate the functionality of a fairly large and complex database that I, the nonprogrammer, somehow managed to build in Access, despite complete ignorance of SQL and VisualBasic.

Ok, so, first question: is there any way (or is there planned to be a way) to link between two forms using a field type OTHER than single select/multiple select?

I am trying to link (to use one example) the "authorname" field in my "manuscript submission" form to the "name" field in my contacts form. I seriously do NOT want to have the user entering data into the manuscript submission form to have to pick "authorname" from a picklist of all "names" pulled from the contacts form for two reasons:

(1) there are ~2000 names in my contacts table/form, and I don't want the user to have to scroll through them all to find the right one! Because it seems that this implementation of picklists only looks at the last letter typed, if you type in "b" it would take you to the first name that begins with b (out of 100+), but then typing "r" would not take you to the names the begin with br, but rather to the first name that begins with r. In other words, *if* when selecting an item from a picklist it looked at the whole sequence the user types to drill down to the desired selection, this might work. But because it doesn't build up that sequence, it's impractical for a field that has a huge number of entries.

(2) the author may not be in the contacts form yet. In my current Access database, if are doing data entry on manuscripts submissions and you enter in an authorname that is not in contacts, it adds a new record in contacts. It would really be a step back in terms of user friendliness if the user had to go to the contacts form/view to enter a new record and then come back to the manuscript submission view to finish entering the manuscript record.

A real world implementation of Library Manager would run into problem #1 in a big way: on the "issue book" view, for example, right now the "name of book" field is fine because there are only two titled books in the database. And "issued to user" is fine as a picklist because there are only 10 users. But imagine a real library--even a small primary school library--that has 5,000 books and 500 users in the database. Is your librarian going to want to pick the book to issue from a picklist of 5000 books? Especially if she cannot "drill down" based on an input sequence?