Classroom attendance form - Please point in the right direction

[thaonguyen]

Hi everyone,

I am a beginner of Access and I want to build this form to help my company be more environmentally friendly. We are a training provider.

So we have a database of learners with a column of the day in the week that they take lessons at our place and another column with AM or PM.

Now I would like a form where the tutor choose the date from a calendar, then indicate whether it's morning or afternoon class, then a Click button I guess. And the register for the collect class appears.

Within the register, I would like to have one column with the name, one column of where they work, a column that says either Present, Unauthorised Absent, Authorised Absent, and Late. If Late, it has the option to put in how many minutes. The tutor also has the option to remove learner(s) if they drop out and add new learner(s) (lookup learner(s) from the existing database). Finally there is a click button that they can save that day's register onto our system in a specific folder but name is automatically generated in the form like:
AAT (short for accountancy)-Day of the week-AM/PM-Date(15.09.2019)-Level 3/Level 4.xls
* Depending on the day and time of the week that class is either Level 3 or Level 4 accountancy.

I am beginner but I can say I am good at researching. I am not sure how to explain it but a couple of years back, through researching and modifying existing free samples/ codes, I managed to build a database with a form to add in information of an English teaching book page with info as what grammar points, what age group, speaking or listening or writing...And another form to search the database with multiple search field including a text search combined with list.

Looking back now, not sure how I did it. What I mean is if you can sort of give me some information of where to begin and what to do, I hope I can research my way through it.

Thank you so so much in advance for all the amazing support

 

[Pat Hartman]

Some general advice. KISS. Although you currently have only the option for AM or PM and you only have four attendance status options, that doesn't mean that you might want to change something later. By boxing yourself in with rules that are not technically necessary, you impede your ability to go with the flow. Step back and think about the simplest solution possible. Define the tables you need and the data they will hold.

For starters, you have a person table. I call it "person" rather than student or trainer because you might have a need for trainers to take a particular class and so they would be the trainer of one class but a student in another. Their role in a particular class would be defined in the Roster table where students and trainers are joined to class instances with role being one of the attributes. But we NEVER do that! To that I say, why make it hard to do? Sometimes there are rules that need to be enforced. There are 10 computers in each training room, therefore, the classes are limited to 10 students. But this might also change some time in the future so you would put the max student limit in a table. Perhaps the class table. Or if you go to the level of tracking classrooms, then the limit would be associated with the classroom.

Anyway, your "question" wasn't actually a question. It was more like a statement of work so I'm suggesting a starting approach. See if you can come up with attributes and sort them into tables. Some people do this on a whiteboard. I usually do it with a table in Access. As my ideas solidify, I add more details such as what data type I want and what table an attribute belongs in.