as far as lookup tables go, in the data assist wizard, on the Manage pages tab, go to the Field settings section
for the columns that will use lookup data, set them to use a menu as the display, click the lightning bolt to access the menu settings and select the loop table use, set the ID column and the label column.
what this will do is add a recordset to the page for be used to populate the menu and add a join query to the main recordset to lookup the label to display on the results page.
do this with a small sample to inspect the results and get a better idea.
Lookup tables are used to create a 1 to Many Data relation ship, the Relational tables concept is used for creating a Many to Many relationship. For example:
lets take the concept of Products and Categories. In some cases, you may set up products so that they can only belong to 1 category. This would use the linking table concept using a structure like this:
categories:
categoryID - Primary Key
categoryName
products:
productID - Primary Key
productCategoryID - Relates to categories.categoryID
productName
etc
in this structure the category is set in the products table so that the product is limited to belonging to only one category.
If you wanted to allow the product to belong to many categories, you would use a third relational table. the products table would not contain the productCategoryID column. you would create another table as:
productcategories:
productcategoriesID - Primary Key
productcategoriesCategoryID - Relates to products.productID
productcategoriesProductID - Relates to categories.categoryID