Newby in distress

[kiboodez]

Hi all,

I am a complete newby to the access game - but am looking forward to the challenge of learning (slowly).

Challenge 1 (perhaps ambitious) is to make a department monitoring/recording system for a school Maths department. Any hints/tips for this would be appreciated!

Basically, I want any member of staff to be able to pick a students name out and enter some information about them on that day:

for example, If I pick out Jim from class 1C then I want to say that he hasn't completed his homework (tick box?) and that he was distracting pupils all period (comment box?).

From, there I should close this and my job is done. However I am able to call up all records for any pupil within a given date range at any time.

This, as I say, is possibly ambitious as a first project - but I'm willing to give it a go!!

Thanks for any hints/tips in advanc.

 

[plog]

1: Read up on Normalization. That's the process of correctly laying out your tables. The most important step is getting your tables correctly set up.

2: Start at the end. What data do you want out of this thing? Be they reports or spreadsheets, make a mock up so you know what data you need to capture to generate them.

3: Lay out your tables to accomodate that data. Again, the most important part. Give this a shot, then post your attempt back to this forum.

4. Don't even think about the user interface until #3 is done. User experience doesn't dictate data storage. You make all those fancy, user-responsive forms after you have your tables set up correctly.

 

[kiboodez]

Thank you for the response, I will mock up a simple version and post it asap.

 

[Mile-O]

and that he was distracting pupils all period (comment box?)

On top of what plog says (and once you've looked into normalisation), I think I'd be inclined to create something along the line of a Behaviours table, whereby you can record these things. That way, you can do something concrete with the records (count by day, week, month, year, etc.) which you would find more difficult with comments, as people will write different things, and you really do get some awful rambling in comments boxes.