G
Guest
This is a bit complex, so bear with me as I lay out the situation:
I have a stack of questionnaires that I need to build a database for. I
have ~150 responses, each response is a multi-page document with 200 lines,
each line has the name of a skill and several pieces of data about that skill
(how would you rate your knowledge of this skill, date of last training, do
you desire additional training, etc.).
So, I have built a table for the responders (name, manager, dept, etc) and a
table which lists all the skills, and a linking table with responder ID,
skill ID, and a field for each piece of data on that line. So far so good.
Now I need to make a form to enter in all this data. The brute force method
would be to build a simple form with dropdowns for responder and skill name,
text boxes for each field, and a save button - basically filling out the form
once for each line of each response. However, this would require scrolling
through a 150-line dropdown and a 200-line dropdown 200x150 times. That's a
lot of scrolling.
I would prefer to make a form that looks like the paper sheet, a grid of
lines and columns. My first thought was to make a tabbed form (one tab for
each skill category) with a continuous-form subform showing the lines for all
the skills in that category.
The problem: if all the data was already entered, this would work great.
However, since there are no records entered yet, the continuous form is
empty. It looks like somehow I need to create "blank" records in my linking
table (with only the responder and skill name filled in) before I can put
them on the form to fill in the rest of the data. But I haven't figured out
how to create an append query that will do this for me, and I'd rather not
have to manually create 30,000 records one by one. Can anyone give me a
clue, 'cause I sure need one?
I have a stack of questionnaires that I need to build a database for. I
have ~150 responses, each response is a multi-page document with 200 lines,
each line has the name of a skill and several pieces of data about that skill
(how would you rate your knowledge of this skill, date of last training, do
you desire additional training, etc.).
So, I have built a table for the responders (name, manager, dept, etc) and a
table which lists all the skills, and a linking table with responder ID,
skill ID, and a field for each piece of data on that line. So far so good.
Now I need to make a form to enter in all this data. The brute force method
would be to build a simple form with dropdowns for responder and skill name,
text boxes for each field, and a save button - basically filling out the form
once for each line of each response. However, this would require scrolling
through a 150-line dropdown and a 200-line dropdown 200x150 times. That's a
lot of scrolling.
I would prefer to make a form that looks like the paper sheet, a grid of
lines and columns. My first thought was to make a tabbed form (one tab for
each skill category) with a continuous-form subform showing the lines for all
the skills in that category.
The problem: if all the data was already entered, this would work great.
However, since there are no records entered yet, the continuous form is
empty. It looks like somehow I need to create "blank" records in my linking
table (with only the responder and skill name filled in) before I can put
them on the form to fill in the rest of the data. But I haven't figured out
how to create an append query that will do this for me, and I'd rather not
have to manually create 30,000 records one by one. Can anyone give me a
clue, 'cause I sure need one?