Richard,
I work for an engineering firm that has teams of people working on projects that, sometimes, take years to complete.  Our company maintains communication by sending weekly project reports to the client, sub-contractors and our project administrators.

I designed a data base that tracks the activity,generates the reports, and sends them out in email messages.  We then save the PDF report in a separate "Project Reports" folder with the other project information.

Right now, I saved the blank template data base on one of our servers.  The project manager makes a copy and saves it in the project folder so that anyone who works on the project can enter activities and dates.  The project manager can then generate the reports for that specific project.

My question is, is this the most efficient way to use Access, or is creating a new data base for each individual project using too much memory?

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Reply from Richard Rost:

What you're doing sounds fine. In fact, I would even go one step further and get rid of the PDF files. I would move the Access database up to a web server and have all of the necessary data entry and reporting done up there instead of relying on exporting PDF reports and emailing them around. But as many people have told me recently, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. No, I definitely would NOT generate separate databases for each project. This way if you decide you need to make a design change, you have to change multiple databases... unless you make one front-end and swap the back-end tables... but that can also be a lot of work.