Simple Access functionality

[lexfast]

Hi,

I am looking for someone to tell me if the following requirements are possible in Access. I work for a charity and our excel sheet if getting far to unwieldy. We have been quotes £2000 for a CRM but I am not sure it is actually geared up to what we need so I am looking at alternatives. Our charity runs training courses for practitioners. In a nut shell I need to:

1. Record all the practitioners who attend our training courses

2. Record all the training courses that we carry out inc numbers of attendees

3. Be able to select an individual attendee and see which training courses they attended

4. Be able to select a training course and be able to see who attended

5. Be able to manually log who has filled in an evaluation form but to be able to see this in relating to all attendees of a training course

Is this possible? I have had a play already and have two tables; clients and training courses. But without having multible columns for differnt traininf dates, I am struggling to figure out how to connect the two tables.

Thank you so much

[#2]

@lexfast 

Short Answer: Yes, Access is a good choice for applications of this sort.

Longer Answer: You can build a rudimentary relational database application with your current knowledge level and experience (apparently very limited). However, it will require a good deal more learning on your part to be able to EFFECTIVELY create such a relational database application. If you value your time at, say £20 an hour, you're talking about 100 hours of your time as the rough cost-based comparison. I think, again, given the question and your apparent level of current experience and knowledge, 100 hours is a conservative estimate of how long it will take you to do this EFFECTIVELY.

Of course, your time may be more or less valuable than the hypothetical number I posed. And you'll have to make the decision accordingly. In the end, though, I think your most profitable approach would be to hire a competent, experienced Access developer to work with you and build it for you, or to pay the license cost for the bespoke application.