Scheduling/Calendar Functionality (1 Viewer)

intruesiive

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I am building an access database for the education department of the museum I work for.

They currently use Excel for their booking calendar. We use Excel because although there is a default set of time slots per day that is currently copied & pasted months in advance, the time slots per day are extremely fluid. The only formulaic piece is that no one staff member can be booked for simultaneous time slots.

The staff member in charge of this booking calendar manipulates the document based on staff availability and other museum events. When a booking is made, the staff member refers to the booking calendar, tells the client what times are available first, and only finishes the transaction once the client agrees to an available time slot.


The only relevant table in my database is my bookings table, which has a many to many relationship to the staffMembers table. My gut instinct is to create a macro that populates "blank" booking records that contain the date and time, to account for each time slot in the default set - is that possible?

Then, I'd make the booking form have the default view of spreadsheet, so that when someone clicks "new booking" from my main menu, the new booking form opens as a spreadsheet. They can refer to the slots available, and double click into a slot, which prompts the new booking form to open in form view/edit mode, with the date and time populated since they're editing an existing record. From the new booking form, they'd link the booking record to an existing client record (or add a new client record, and then link) .

Then, at the end of every week/month/quarter (to be determined), I'd hope to automatically run a macro that deletes every unused time slot/every booking record that contains no information (i.e. not linked to a client record).


I'm not sure this is the best way to do it since it seems to take up a lot of unnecessary space unless I successfully create an automatic macro that deletes empty time slots. :confused:
Please let me know if I need to add more information to my question. Thank you so much!!
 
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spikepl

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Please chuck many more line breaks into your text to make it readable.
 

spikepl

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The only thing you mention is "booking". If that is the case then how about Outlook? It has a user interface dedicated to showing time slots, bookings, overlaps, available periods etc etc ... The lack of which specific features in Outlook has resulted in this process being supported by Excel (or now Access)?
 

intruesiive

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This is a large project that has many more tables than just 'booking.' I would like the information to feed into Outlook but I don't want the information to reside there. I'm not TOO concerned with having the burden of managing availability/overlapping schedules be on the system itself - the staff member in charge of managing the calendar is responsible for manipulating the data so that there is no 'double booking.' The purpose of this database is two-fold - to keep records for year-end statistical reporting on education programs provided by the museum, and to manage the schedules of the educators. The person making the booking needs to see which time slots and programs are available, and the information needs to be as malleable as it is in Excel so that the users don't feel that this database is more cumbersome than their current system.
 

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