Starting an attendance db (looking for help)

[Dennis Woodward]

My church is wanting to start to take attendance in the various small groups
and services.

I am a bit stuck in getting started because I am wanting to add new dates
"on the fly" as well as new "groups".

Anyone have any suggestions?

 

[Guest]

When I do attendance for my programs, I just create a new field called, for
example, Jesus Day Attend, then write either yes or no in the field. If there
is payment involved, create another field called Jesus Day Paid, then write
either paid or due. As long as the same words are used, you can easily create
queries to grab the attendees incase you want to do mailings or make nametags
for them.

 

[Douglas J. Steele]

No offence, but that's not the right way to create a database.

You should have a table representing the attendees, a table representing the
events, and a table that resolves the many-to-many relationship between
attendees and events.

It's called database normalization. Jeff Conrad has a great set of links to
resources on this topic at
http://home.bendbroadband.com/conradsystems/accessjunkie/resources.html#DatabaseDesign101