Query not returning all the records I need

[upsman]

I have 3 tables - Students, which contains all students; Attendance, which contains dates a particular student was absent; and AttendanceCtrl which contains Quarter beginning/ending dates. I need to be able to calculate the number of days a student was present, absent, tardy in a quarter. The query needs to extract all students regardless of whether or not they missed any days. I tried using a Left join Students to Attendance and then joining AttendanceCtrl but Access said it couldn't do it because of "ambiguous outer joins". It said to create the first join then use that query in the second join. I tried that. I created a query with a Left join joining Students to Attendance. That gives me what I wanted, all students from Students and also those students with matching records in Attendance.

The 2nd query is giving me problems. I tried joining the first query (qryStudents) to AttendanceCtrl and calculating my totals. Problem is, the query only gives me students what have records in the Attendance file; it doesn't give me all the students. If a student did not miss any days, I need to show that he was present 90 days out of 90. Because there's no matching record in the Attendance file, I get nothing for those students.

As I said the first query (qryStudents) seems to be working but I need to take the records from that query, group them together by StudentID, and then calculate my totals. How can I do this? Am I approaching this wrong altogether?

Thanks for any help.

 

[FoFa]

You need to calculate the days in the quarter (Use DateDiff), then subtract the absent (and/or tardy) from that for days present.