How can I make my spreadsheet data relational?

I'm trying to move my data from a flat-file spreadsheet to a relational database. The problem is that one of my fields points to a list of choices. For example:

where the (shortened) header is

sku,category,price,wt,size, description

The category field could be one of many store departments such as

1. computers,
2. automotive,
3. jewelry, etc.

I'm having trouble modeling the category in relation to its sku number. I'm sure they're related but I don't know how to link them in a relational database. And does each table need to be in a separate file? I've tried looking at some info on schema and ERD data modeling but could not get much out of it. This is all new to me. Should I continue using my spreadsheet for this case? One of the reasons for the switch was to avoid having to input duplicate data related to each record. Any ideas and newbie tutorials to get me started in the right direction would be appreciated.

Thanks Received on Mon Aug 27 2001 - 01:54:24 CEST