ms access 2003 template?

[staff sergeant]

i am an administrative professional for the marine corps. in my current
office we are using 4 different logbooks/excel tracking systems to keep
accountability of documents as they pass from person to person. we are
spending more time keeping track of documents than actually working. then
when someone wants to know what the status of a document is we've got to
start at one tracker.. then move to the next and next until we find where in
the process it is...

excel trackers are great but cannot be open/updated by more than one person
at a time. access seems to be the right direction.

the quantity of documents are too much to not keep track. before this
cumbersome tracking system too many documents were getting lost. and time was
wasted doing things two, three or four times.

does anyone have a template that might help us get started? or could
volunteer their time to create a simple one, similar to the access 2007 task
tracker. the marine corps is too cheap to install office 2007 until probably
2017. thanks for reading. i can be reached at "(e-mail address removed)".

 

[Larry Linson]

The Microsoft-provided templates for Access 2003 are at
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/templates/CT101426031033.aspx. One step
back from that, you'll find links to templates for Access 2002 and earlier,
most all of which will work with Access 2003.

If each person who needs to record/retrieve information in your database is
connected on the LAN to a server, and there are not too many people (depends
on a lot of factors, but if the number of users is 30 or fewer, then as my
UK friends would say "Bob's your auntie's live-in lover"), you can split the
front end (queries, forms, reports, macros, and modules) from the back end
(tables, data, and relationships) and link the tables in the backend so the
users can share the data.

Larry Linson
Microsoft Office Access MVP