I have a working database that I am "tweaking" and would like advice on best
practices for table design.  Scorecards are composed of multiple measures
often with multiple data types.  Currently I have a text field in one table
that holds the results of all our measures.  This works fine for reports
because I have assigned each measure a "type", i.e. percent, currency etc.
and use this related field to format the result in my report via an if
statement.  I am not sure that this is best practice though, because
obviously when the data is entered I can't utilize input masks or validation
rules.  I don't really want to have a separate field or table for each data
type though.  The first seems wasteful and the second seems like a lot of
extra work.  Thoughts and feedback would be appreciated.