title: One (probably unbound) Access 2003 form to create multiple records
body: <p>I've been recruited to work on a form for tracking specimens. Each specimen is associated with a subject; each specimen also has a particular slot in a 9 x 9 storage box. For ease of data entry, I think it would be best if the Access form mirrored the box itself (and the paper forms that will be used to enter data into Access): nine columns by nine rows, with each element consisting basically of a text box for the specimen ID. This is basically how I'd like it to look:</p>
  <p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/Hr5ak.png" alt="alt text" /></p>
  <p>So the data entry person would essentially type in the box number and specimen IDs, then click &quot;Create Records&quot; to pop all of those records into existence (you can see some other stuff going on here, but that's not really important right now). I'm not really sure about the best way to code this, however. Right now, the best process I can think of is to: 1) run an insert query to create the box if it doesn't exist, 2) run an insert query to create the subject (person), if it doesn't exist, and 3) run an insert query for each specimen, hard-coding in its row and column (e.g. box_col = 'A', box_row = '1').</p>
  <p>Note: the subject ID and specimen ID would both be parsed out of the ID field - it's goofy, not my idea, but that's how it's set up. I can handle that, though.</p>
  <p>This is a certainly a kludge, but I'm not sure what else to do and most of what I've googled up hasn't been pertinent to multiple-record creation from a single form. Is there a better way to do this? Should I simply abandon the idea and go with a more traditional bound subform approach?</p>