Hello!

PMFJI...

Jeff, I have created a small program to track attendance in my classes. I
use a system similar in general concept to that created by Slider. I wonder
if "useless" would be correct with respect to the "dummy" attendees. Could
there possibly be value in knowing that someone didn't attend a class? In
other words, for all my students for a class on a given day, I need to know
if they attended or not; thus, I need a record indicating attendance for
every student. I suppose I might be able to derive this by querying for
nulls, however. Still, it seems reasonable to me, or am I misguided?

In addition, just to expand the discussion, I like this approach because
tracking attendance (at least for me, and I know that the OP didn't specify
this!) involves more than just being present/absent. In my record keeping I
record 4 states: Present, Late, Absent (i.e. known excused absence), Unknown
(unexcused absence or, I suppose.. teacher failed to mark attendance g). I
can do this by creating a "dummy" record for each student, set to "Unknown"
as the default value.

I *do* appreciate the ease of data entry that this approach affords me: I
press a button, and the just check the appropriate value for each student.
However, I'd be happy to get any suggestions that might indicate a better
approach!

Cheers!
Fred Boer

P.S. I just *love* the concept of "dummy" attendees! Not that any of my
students would qualify..


"Jeff Boyce" -DISCARD_HYPHEN_TO_END wrote in message
...
If you are saying that you are filling a table with "dummy" attendees, and
checking only those that actually attended, you'd be storing useless (and
potentially confusing) records.

Or did I misunderstand?

--
Regards

Jeff Boyce
Office/Access MVP

"Slider" wrote in message
ups.com...
Thanks Jeff

What I've actually ended up doing (after having another crack at it
this morning) is as follows.

User opens a form which allows them to pick a date, then clicks a
button which launches a macro.

The macro first runs an append table query which basically creates a
new entry in the attendance table for all possible attendees for that
date.

It then opens a form in a datasheet view that is based on a query
pulling out all the entries from the attendance table for that date.

The user is then able to use a checkbox to indicate present/not
present, and simply close down the form when they are finished. All
records are of course saved when they do this.

This approach certainly has some dissadvantages, especially in
presentation, but I'm working on those.

Do you see any glaring holes in this approach that I may have
overlooked?

Thanks