DB Design Help

[mike]

I'm trying to design a DB to record student incident reports in our school.
right now a teacher has to write up a report manually but it would be more
useful if we could store the data electronically for multiple reasons...

i was thinking of using access to create a db to store the submitted
incident reports. therefore a teacher would have to fill out a new incident
form for each incident. it would be added to the DB. since a form is for a
student we would need to count the number of forms per students, but the
forms must be separate.

for example, johnny gets written on Mon and then again the following Tues
for a total of 2 incidents.

the form is pretty basic stuff: name, grade, type of incident, comments,
date, etc.

big issues are:
1. how can every staff member access the forms over the network
2. what other potential issues/pitfalls might arise that i should be aware
of?

at any pt in the day, our admin staff should be able to pull a query to see
who's being written up and how many times. a student might be written up in
1st and 2nd pd by different teachers but both incidents should show up.

any advice on how to attack this is much appreciated

 

[tina]

comments inline.

I'm trying to design a DB to record student incident reports in our school.
right now a teacher has to write up a report manually but it would be more
useful if we could store the data electronically for multiple reasons...

i was thinking of using access to create a db to store the submitted
incident reports. therefore a teacher would have to fill out a new incident
form for each incident. it would be added to the DB. since a form is for a
student we would need to count the number of forms per students, but the
forms must be separate.

for example, johnny gets written on Mon and then again the following Tues
for a total of 2 incidents.

the form is pretty basic stuff: name, grade, type of incident, comments,
date, etc.

big issues are:
1. how can every staff member access the forms over the network

assuming that the network is a LAN (not a WAN), you would have a "split
database" setup: backend db on the server, holding the tables. a copy of
the frontend db on each user's PC, linked to the backend db's tables, and
containing the queries, forms, reports, macros, modules.

2. what other potential issues/pitfalls might arise that i should be aware
of?

as you may have realized from the above comments, this is not a trivial
question you're asking. creating a multi-user database, as an Access
"newbie", is biting off a fairly good-sized chunk. the work process you
describe is pretty simple, and shouldn't require a lot of fancy footwork to
set up - once you have at least a fair handle on what you're doing - and
Access is certainly a good choice for entering, storing, and analyzing this
kind of data.

i recommend you start out "right", right from the get-go: learn how to lay
out a correctly structured relational design, and then learn how to use
Access to implement it. expect to invest significant time in the learning
process; unless you have prior experience working with relational design
principles, and with Access, you're not going to be able to knock this out
in a day or two. for more information, see
http://home.att.net/~california.db/tips.html, starting with tips 1 and 2.

hth