Need to Know How to Create a Fillable Form to Share

[ajoest]

I am creating a form for the online retail company I work for that outlines customer issues. Several workers may need to view and add information to the same customer form, depending on who is helping the customer at the time. This has traditionally been completely up to me, but when I am not available I need someone to be able to look at the form and tell the customer where we are with their issue (example: a replacement item has been sent, we are waiting on a photo of the damage, etc). The owners and I created a hard copy of the form, but no one seems to be able to follow along-- not to mention that this has amassed a mountain of papers in my office. One of the owners insist I keep track of every single issue and then file it away in case I need to go back to it. Personally, I prefer digital copies that I can search. I don't mind printing and filing to back that up, but right now there are dozens of forms on my desk in various stages of completion....



Back to the form I am creating. I want it to be a simplified version of the hard copy. I have a pieces of what I want created in Access, I just need help bringing it all together. Every form filled out on a customer who has contacted us with an issue includes basic info: order number, name, contact method, date, shipping carrier, and problem. Next comes a plan of action-- how are we going to take care of this customer? Are we sending a replacement, sending parts, or issuing a refund? These are the most common resolutions, but each have their own set of basic requirements (such as under Replacement Item Needed we have fields for when we requested a picture, received the picture, the tracking number for the replacement, etc). What I want is for those fields to only appear if the appropriate plan of action is selected. Right now I have the plan of action choices listed in a drop-down menu on the main table. Is it possible to have specific fields available depending on what my workers select in the drop down menu? How do I do this? I thought Access would be the best Office 2010 program to do this with. It seems like I did this in my college class, but that feels like a lifetime ago (and it was an earlier version of Access).

Please help!!

[June7]

A multi-user database should be split design. Backend has data and is located on central file server. Frontend links to the backend and is the user interface. Each user has their own copy of the frontend.