I just discovered 2 features of the linking window that make it easier to work with a large number of tables.   Some of you may have already found these but maybe I am not the only one that overlooked them:

Change Linking View:

If you right click in the background of the linking window there is an option to “Change Linking View”.  This collapses all tables to just their headers and shows a single line join for all links.  I find that this is great for a big picture view of the tables.  To see individual fields for a table you can double click on the heading of a table and it opens up that table to normal view.  Another double click on the heading collapses it back down again.

Locate Table:

If you have lots of tables and you don’t want to scroll around to find a particular one you can right click in the background and select “Locate Table”.  This will give you a list of the tables in the window in alphabetical order.  Highlight any table in the list and it takes you directly to that table.   This is especially helpful when you have really long table names and they are wider than the tables, making it tough to distinguish tables with similar names.