Unexpected results when linking records and using Groupings

[Aaron_Barnhart]

Hi all — I have a table with 1000+ TV shows and movies that I’m exporting in A-Z order so they can be laid out in Indesign. We’ll call this Table 1. But I also want to create lists with those shows following a simple hierarchy:

1. Grouping (Drama, Comedy, Reality, etc.)
   1. List (Cop Dramas, Med Dramas, Intense Dramas, etc.)
      1. Show #1
         … 2. Show #2
      2. etc.

To accomplish this I created Table 2, and used Link fields to tie the shows in Table 1 to the lists in Table 2. Everything went great for a while. To build a list in Table 2, I would assign a show in Table 1 to a list in Table 2, then duplicate the line and link it to a different show.

Where I got myself into trouble — and I can’t find a way out — is that I did a shortcut. I started creating lists on the fly in Table 1. Not Table 2. At the time I noticed I wasn’t being asked to link the list to a grouping, but I think “well, I can do that later.” But I found I couldn’t. Jumping over to Table 2 I saw all my new lists … but they weren’t associated with any groups. And furthermore, the shows I’d assigned to them were not being linked in Table 2.

Here’s an example. As you can see in Table 1, there are 10+ shows in this Primetimer Picks list…

But when you look at that Primetimer Picks list in Table 2, the list exists but nothing is correlated with it.

I’m not even sure how to fix my error. Thanks for any help.

[Aaron_Barnhart]

The good news is that I figured out how to get out of my immediate jam. It’s tedious but I simply went back to my original method, creating new lines for each of the entries in each list in Table 2, creating a separate tab for Table 1, peeking over there to get 2-3 titles, going back to Table 2, keying them in …

… so I’ll survive, but I’d really like to know what I did wrong.