We started this chapter by showing how you could split multiple values in a single cell across different rows. However, this might not always be what you want. In the examples so far, each of the different values had an identical role: one category is just like any other, and their order is interchangeable. The situation is different when a field is overloaded with different types of values. This can happen, for instance, when a Clients
table contains a telephone field but no e-mail field and a contact person has provided both pieces of information. As a result, the person's telephone number and e-mail address could end up in the same field, separated by a slash.
We see a similar situation happen in various columns of the Powerhouse Museum Collection data. For instance, in the Provenance field, we see information about designers, makers, and various other things. It could be meaningful to put those in different columns so we can analyze them separately...