First Time Posting - Needing Help with a Form for Teachers contacting Parents

[marneffcit]

I have used Access for Basic Databasing, but I have been asked to create a form (using Access 2007) that teachers, can enter information after calling home discussing a child not doing to well in his or her class. There is a table setup with the exact names of each section in the form to collect the information. Here is what the teachers would like the form to do.

1) Be able to search for a student by his or ID and do an auto fill for Student's full name, Student ID, and phone number. They would also like it to autofill parent's info, but I can not find that type of report to load that information on my side. After it autofills those three sections the teacher can then begin to type and record notes from the conversation. I created one combo box that the teacher's can choose from a list the problem they are having with the student. Only issue is they want to be able to choose multiple reasons and I can only set it up to select one reason. After they fill in on the information I created a submit button.

2) Here is the issue with the table, I imported the three bits of information (Student's full name, ID, and phone number). This created a line of data for each student. If the teacher or in this case teachers (teachers that have the same student can see the same information) go in to call the student again, this database does not create a NEW entry for the student. It continues from the first entry so that means some of the information can get deleted from the first phone call home. How do I get the form and the table to create a new entry each time the teachers contact the parents?

I hope I have explained my scenario as clear as possible. I have thirteen separate sections the teachers have to answer in the form and then the information from there goes and populates into the table. I really hope someone out there can or will accept this challenge to help me.

Thank you,

[Dal Jeanis]

Okay, this is basically a contact database. The problem is that you decided that each CHILD is a record, rather than each CONTACT being a record. That just won't work.
Go over to Roger's access library at http://rogersaccesslibrary.com and read his quick tutorial on how to design a database. You will save yourself dozens of hours of floundering if you spend just a little time understanding the basics of entity relationships.
You will need (at least) the following tables

1) tblStudents
      StudentPK    Autokey
      StudentID    Text
      StudentName  Text
      StudentPhone Text or Number

2) tblTeachers
      TeacherPK     AutoKey
      TeacherID     Text
      TeacherName   Text

3) tblContacts
      ContactPK      Autokey
      ContactDate    Date/time
      TeacherID      Foreign Key to TeacherID
      StudentID      Foreign Key to StudentID
      (Your thirteen Sections go here)

Whenever a teacher fills out a new contact form, you make a new tblContacts record with that teacher's ID, the current date, and the student's id.

[mrojas]

Sounds like you need a main form with a sub-form. The main form would have the Student's full name, Student ID, and phone number. The sub-form all conversation records. This means, you'll need at least two tables; one for the main information, the other for the conversations. They'd be tied together by an auto-number key, or student ID.