Programming Help Please

[JWhitehead]

I am working on a training database for our company. It is to track all the
trainings that a person has done, or needs to do. New trainings should be
entered either by the employee name, or by the department.

Currently though, new trainings can only be added by the employee. If we try
to add a new training, based on the training group (admin, operators,
maitenance, etc) it will just create a new employee for that group.

Does anyone know of a way to make it possible to create a new training based
on either the employee or their department/group?

I've tried a few different ways, but none have worked for me.

I've tried to have the department/group in the employee table, and I've
tried also to have a separate table for the department with the employees
linked to their respective department(s).

Any suggestions as to how to fix this issue would be greatly appreciated.

I am using MS Office '07 Pro. Thank you for your time and thoughts.

 

[Sylvain Lafontaine]

You are starting to see why designing a database is much more complicated
and time consuming than what it appears to be at the beginning of a new
project.

You don't explain what is a "training" in your current design. Is it a
single piece of information like a commentary or a phone number or something
more complex stored in a separate table and that can be each shared by more
than a single employee?

If it's the second case that is true, then an employee can have multiple
trainings and each of these trainings can be associated with more than a
single employee. This is known as a N-N relationship. To design it, you
need to have an employees table, a trainings table and a third table that
will stores all the associations between the employees and the trainings
tables. It's not uncommon to see a database with many of these N-N
relationships tables.

--
Sylvain Lafontaine, ing.
MVP - Windows Live Platform
Blog/web site: http://coding-paparazzi.sylvainlafontaine.com
Independent consultant and remote programming for Access and SQL-Server
(French)