You're going to need to get creative and use multiple subforms if you want to list the data like that out ever week with totals below each week.

But in it's most simple form, this could be done with just a simple giant continuous form based on a table with the fields Date, Hours, Location, Arrive1,Depart1,Arrive2,Depart2,Authorized Credits, Reason for absence, Debits, Notes, and attendance. Total Hours should be a calculation, and depending on your use, current balance will probably be a calculation.

Then you are just doing formatting to address the appearance. Other than getting the weekly totals to appear and needing to use subforms/filtering it would be pretty basic. If you can live without those totals and just put them all togethor, you can just put the weekly totals all together in the footer or something with DLookup or count/sum.

I'm not sure if Richard has a specific video covering using subforms to achieve something like this, I think it's more across many videos learning how to interact with it like this, but Continuous Forms is the basic form.

Yeah, I wouldn't bother with multiple subforms. I'd go with a single continuous form, and if you want to see a breakdown by week, just put filter buttons on it so you can say, "Show me week one," or "Show me week four," or "Show me weeks 10 through 15," whatever. But if I could see the data more clearly, then I could give you more input. I can barely read what you have there, even if I zoom in.

volgen :)

Hi Sandi, your Excel form is cumbersome because it lacks structure, and that is what a database can offer.  But to have structure in Access, you need to design the structure yourself -- by creating "normalized" table structure.  You need to have your tables set up properly before you can begin to design how your data entry forms should look and work.  For instance, a normalized table may look something like:

PersonID   LineNum    DateTime             Location     Notes
1          1          27-May-2024          None         Absent - bank holiday
1          2          28-May-2024 07:00    None         Arrive
1          3          28-May-2024 12:00    None         Depart
1          4          28-May-2024 12:30    None         Arrive
1          5          28-May-2024 18:00    None         Depart

Your Excel sheet only has two columns for arrivals and departures.  What if a person arrives and departs more times than that?  You'll have to add more columns in the middle, making it even more cumbersome.  But a properly designed table like the above can accommodate any number of arrivals and departures.

In Access, data entry forms are for entering "records," which are rows.  And that means data have to placed in a structured manner.  You cannot enter data wherever you want like in Excel.

You have an "expert" badge so I assume you know at least some of these topics.  In short, there is a paradigm shift from designing for Excel to doing it in Access.

Kevin (like usual) is correct. But it is well worth making this paradigm shift to Access for your application.

Thank you everyone.  I understand what you are saying, this is a sheet that I inherited and the boss wants to put a very similar looking interface in front of the staff.

You CAN do it... you'd need to use multiple subforms if you want it to look exactly like that. There's always ways to make Access look and behave like other software... but it's almost always BETTER in the long run if you change your processes to conform to how a real database application SHOULD work.

Hi Sandi, you said so yourself: it's cumbersome.  You need to tell your boss that, and ask him to let you change it.  It's cumbersome precisely because of the unstructured Excel layout, from what I can see.  A unwieldy user interface will hurt productivity, which I'm sure your boss cares about.

Yeah, back in my consulting days, I used to actually make workers MAD at me because I'd come in, streamline their operations (from their old Excel sheets or DOS app days) and then what used to take them 2 days now took 20 minutes. They feared for their jobs.

I went through the same thing in the 1990s when some of my co-workers were resistant to technological changes.  At the end, our industry and trading partners made those tech changes mandatory, and that made my job easier.

In this forum, you are a teacher, not a consultant, so you should have more freedom in how you give advice.  As a consultant, you are under your client's employ, so you may not be as "free" in your advice-giving, because you are under your client's employ.  And they may only hear or accept what they want to hear or accept.  This is from my first-hand experience too.  If the client wants to walk on hot coal bare-foot, you have to comply.

Yeah... And fortunately I have tenure here so I can day what I want. Lol.