checkboxes and update queries

[Jennifer]

We're running a continuing education workshop where
employees' positions determine which stations they are to
attend. I've created an Access form exactly like their
paper form to check off what stations/courses they
attended, and when attendance is recorded, they are
issued contEd credits. We don't need to compare their
position to a list of requirements, we just want to know
who went to what stations.

Right now I have a table "Courses" with two fields: the
17 course names and their codes. The "Employees" table is
where we'll draw ID info. Another table is "Attendance,"
which is where I plan to record who went to what courses.
My cute little form of checkboxes is mostly unbound,
which of course will change once I figure out how to
attach everything.

My initial thought was to run an update query based on
the courses checked (if=true, add a record to Attendance
table). I can't figure out how to connect the checkbox to
the course code, though. Should the checkbox be bound to
a yes/no field in the Courses table? If so, how the heck
would that work? While I know making the course codes my
field names would solve this problem more easily, it
would violate normalization rules. Any suggestions?

 

[Steve Schapel]

Jennifer,

In my opinion, the simplest way to do this (which will not look like the
paper form!), is to make a form, continuous view, based on the
Attendance table, and add it as a subform to both the Courses form and
the Employees form (for maximum flexibility). The version of the
subform that goes on the Employees form will have a combobox based on
the Courses table, so you can view/enter all courses attended by the
current employee. The version of the subform that goes on the Courses
form will have a combobox based on the Employees table, so you can
view/enter all employees who have attended the current course.