Offshore rostering

[ms_access_noobie]

Hi,

I work for a services company who supply personnel to offshore facilities. Due to the locations, these shifts can last anywhere from 24 hours to 3 or 4 weeks. The logistics team have been managing details of all of our staff with Excel, but as the team is growing, they are finding issues with corruption in the data.

I have extracted all of the key personal information into Access, i.e. names, trades, contact details etc. however I am unsure how to populate the work roster data.

In Excel, they have a simple table with the columns labelled by day, rows grouped by facility/project and then simply colour code cells with the shifts, for example;



02/01/15
03/01/15
04/01/15
05/01/15
06/01/15
Facility 1
Project 1

Campaign 1 – Fred Smith, Tom Jones

Project 2
Campaign 3 – Rick Knight, Tommy Cooper

Facility 2
Project 6

Campaign 6 – Thomas King, Paul Burrows
Project 9


Campaign 4 – Jim Brown


We currently print this chart off to put on the wall as well as report on who is offshore or who is currently off cycle and when they were last offshore (minimum break periods).

Appreciate any advice anyone may have as to how best to accomplish this please?

It wont let me post images : it is here though imgur.com/LVHhZHr

 

[plog]

First, that's not really a table. To put that into Access properly is going to require a few tables. What you posted is more like a Report (technically it's a Gantt Chart), or the end product of all your data.

A table holds one object's worth of data (eg. People, Facilities, Campaigns). Then you build queries to bring all the related data in the tables together. Then you build reports to display that data.

My advice is to google 'Normalization', read up on it, work through a simple tutorial or two and then give it a shot with your data. Basically, normalization is properly laying out your tables. That's the foundation of all databases, so its integral you get that correctly before moving on to queries and reports. So, read up, give your data a shot, then post back here your table structure (Relationship Window in Access).