I am an Access beginner and am using Access 2007.  I have a database that keeps track of employee travel.  Each employee is required to complete reports following their return from traveling. I want to be able to find out when employese are delinquent in submitting a certain report.

For example, if an employee has 14 days from the date of return to submit "Report A", how to I construct queries that let me know when the deadline is approaching (D minus 5, 3, 1, etc) and when the report is overdue?

My fields relating to this query include Traveler_Name, Date_End_Trip, Date_Due .

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Answer from Richard Rost:

Well, there are several ways you could accomplish this, and it really depends on your skill level and how you want to do it.

I would say for where you are right now (a beginner), I would just make a Trip table (related to your Employee table). Have a field for TripName, Description, TripCompletedDate, ReportFiledDate.

Now, you could create a query showing all records where the TripCompletedDate is more than 14 days in the past:

TripCompletedDate
Criteria:
And where the ReportFiledDate is null.

ReportFiledDate
Is Null

That should show you all trips that were completed more than 14 days ago that don't have reports filed for them. If you need more help with query criteria, see my Access 101 tutorial.