New to Access, in need of some advice

[jdailey]

Hello everyone!


I have recently been tasked with setting up a database for 300 employees to house data concerning the completion of internal training courses.
currently I'm a bit stressed about how to go about setting this up. A little information to help is that there are currently 6 paths of courses "majors" if you will, about 100 courses total are planned to be developed.
currently all I have is a unique identifier attached to each name, email address and course of study on one table and the list of course names/identifiers on another table. I'm somewhat confused as to what relationships/macros need to be developed in order to get those to cooperate fluidly. Eventually we would like to have it set up to email someone after being enrolled in a class/receiving credit for one however that's currently a secondary goal. Any information would be greatly appreciated as most of the tutorials I'm watching on youtube are far below my skill in access or way over my head. Thanks in advance!

[orange]

You need to do some training /testing/learning about database design. Here's a tutorial that will help you get the tables and relationships defined to support your business. This is key. If your tables and relationships are not set up to match your business needs, you'll spend all your time trying to build workarounds to make up for a poor design. Workthrough the tutorial and you'll undertsand what tables are needed, what fields they should contain, what normalization means, how relationships are set up.

[jdailey]

I suppose the largest question I have is if there is an easy way to set this up without having 100 tables of courses that hold information on employees taking the course or having 300 different tables on each employee.

[orange]

You definitely need to understand database design and normalization. See the tutorial from my last post.
I have other suggestions/tutorials, but that's a great start.

[John_G]

Hi -

You have an example here of a many-to-many relationship. Each employee can take many courses, and each course can be taken by many employees. Such a setup always requires at least three tables:

tblEmployee - data pertaining to each of the employees
tblCourse - data about each of the courses
tblEmployee_Course - data about all the courses taken by each employee

The last one is the important one. It will contain the data regarding each employee's attendance at courses, and might contain data something like this:

Employee_ID
Course_ID
Start_Date
End_Date
location
Cost
Results
..
.. etc.
..

Usually there will be other tables for instructors, locations and so on - but those three will be the at the core of what you want to do.

I suggest you look up some information on the concept of data normalization - it is key to good database design.

HTH

John