Input Mask or Data Validation?

[CJ]

I have a field in my column for employees to enter the day of days of the
week. I want them to be able to enter one day, i.e. Mon or several i.e.
Mon-Thur

Is there anyway I can do this? I can figure out how to allow one or the
other, but not both.

Thanks for all your help!

 

[John Vinson]

I have a field in my column for employees to enter the day of days of the
week. I want them to be able to enter one day, i.e. Mon or several i.e.
Mon-Thur

Is there anyway I can do this? I can figure out how to allow one or the
other, but not both.

Thanks for all your help!

What will this field be used for? Storing multiple pieces of info in
one field is generally bad design: what would be the meaning of
Mon-Thurs - all four days, or just the two?

An Input Mask will certainly not be up to this task, and a validation
rule covering all 61 possibilities would be far too cumbersome. You'll
need some VBA code to parse it I would expect!

John W. Vinson[MVP]

 

[CJ]

John,

It's for an absence report. We need to be able to put in individual days as
well as multiple consecutive days. Each entry will have their own line. But
this form will cover a 2 week period, and we'll run out of lines if we don't
allow consecutive days on one line. For our H/R dept. I will need to print
out a hard copy, and they will only accept it as a one page document per
employee.

 

[John Vinson]

John,

It's for an absence report. We need to be able to put in individual days as
well as multiple consecutive days. Each entry will have their own line. But
this form will cover a 2 week period, and we'll run out of lines if we don't
allow consecutive days on one line. For our H/R dept. I will need to print
out a hard copy, and they will only accept it as a one page document per
employee.

Don't confuse data STORAGE with data ENTRY with data REPORTING.
They are three different tasks with different requirements. The need
to produce a final report with multiple records on one line should
*not* drive you to an incorrect table structure, or a cumbersome data
entry task!

If you have four absences... you should have four records in the
table, one for each absence date; or else you should have two fields,
StartDate and EndDate (use the same date for a one-day absence).

Your Report will be based on a Query summarizing the data in the table
- not on a table dump!

John W. Vinson[MVP]

 

[CJ]

Thank you John. I think I needed to sit back for a minute and look at the
whole picture, I was making this too hard.