We're a new trucking company with 10 drivers now and more on the way.  Any suggestions which program to use for organizing and scheduling our employees who all have different schedules? For example, 3 weeks on and 1 week off.  Access? Excel? Google Calendar, MS Project?  Or a big white board? Thank you for any suggestions.

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Reply from Richard Rost:

Well, a calendar app like Google Calendar or Outlook would work OK for just a couple of employees. When you start to get over 5 or 6 that can be cumbersome however... so can a spreadsheet like Excel.

I always try to design solutions myself in Access because that's my background - and I truly feel that Access is the best tool for just about ANY job - but setting something like this up in Access is going to take a lot of up-front work. Your end result is going to be AWESOME, but just be prepared for all of the prep work.

My WORK ORDER SEMINAR covers employee scheduling, with conflict warnings and such. Take a look over that and see if it's of interest. I know the title "Work Order Seminar" is misleading, but there's so much extra stuff covered in that seminar that I'm always referring people to it.

You could also modify my CALENDAR SEMINAR database to track employee schedules (just need to add an employee table, really). That seminar was designed more around printing monthly calendars, but it would work too.