Question

How can I transform this table from this

id name
1  sam
2  nick
3  ali
4  farah
5  josef
6  fadi

to

id1   name1   id2   name2   id3   name3   id4  name4
1     sam     2     nick    3     ali      4   farah
5     josef   6     fadi

the reason i need this is i have a database and i need to do a mail merge using word and I want to print every 4 rows on one page, MS word can only print one row per page, so using an SQL query I want one row to represent 4 rows

thanks in advance

Ali

Answer 1

You don’t need to create a query for this in Access. Word has a merge field called <<Next Record>> which forces moving to the next record. If you look at how label documents are created using the Mail Merge Wizard, you’ll see that’s how it’s done.

Updated – Doing this in SQL

The columns in simple SELECT statements are derived from the columns from the underlying table/query (or from expressions). If you want to define columns based on the data, you need to use a crosstab query.

First create a query with a running count for each person (say your table is called People), and calculate the row and column position from the running count:

SELECT People.id, Count(*)-1 AS RunningCount, int(RunningCount/4) AS RowNumber, RunningCount Mod 4 AS ColumnNumber
FROM People 
LEFT JOIN People AS People_1 ON People.id >= People_1.id
GROUP BY People.id;

(You won’t be able to view this in the Query Designer, because the JOIN isn’t comparing with = but with >=.)

This query returns the following results:

id  Rank  RowNumber  ColumnNumber
1   0     0          0
2   1     0          1
3   2     0          2
4   3     0          3
5   4     1          0
6   5     1          1

Assuming this query is saved as Positions, the following query will return the results:

TRANSFORM First(Item) AS FirstOfItem
SELECT RowNumber
FROM (
    SELECT ID AS Item, RowNumber, "id" &( ColumnNumber + 1) AS ColumnHeading
    FROM Positions

    UNION ALL SELECT Name, RowNumber, "name" & (ColumnNumber +1)
    FROM Positions
    INNER JOIN People ON Positions.id = People.id
) AS AllValues
GROUP BY AllValues.RowNumber
PIVOT AllValues.ColumnHeading In ("id1","name1","id2","name2","id3","name3","id4","name4");

The UNION is there so each record in the People table will have two columns – one with the id, and one with the name.

The PIVOT clause forces the columns to the specified order, and not in alphabetical order (e.g. id1, id2 … name1, name2…)