Hey everyone. This is my first post so forgive me if I confuse anyone (feel free to put me on blast).
I'm a crew scheduler at a private aviation company with over 170 pilots. I'm trying to use MS Access to develop a pilot database/scheduling system. I have a table of all the pilots that work for our company and I have a table that I've been trying to use to create a schedule for each individual pilot.
The biggest problem I have right now is that I don't know what the best way is to schedule a pilot to a day (or rotation of days) of work. My original thought was that I could have a table that assigns dates to fields; however, Access limits the number of fields to 255 (obviously 365 days in a year so that won't work).
My second thought was to assign dates to rows (records) on a table, then somehow link a pilot from the pilot table to the schedule table field that matched his ID.
I may be getting ahead of myself with some of the notes below, but so that you can gain some perspective of what I'm trying to do, here are some of the things I'm trying to accomplish with this project:
1. I only care about what dates pilots are working - they don't have set hours (8am-5pm etc...) so time is not relevant in the scope of what I'm trying to use this database for.
2. Because we have 170+ pilots, it doesn't make sense for me to have a calendar view that includes the name of every pilot. My eventual plan is to create a form or query that populates a calendar with the days an individual pilot is scheduled to work, then email that pilot with their schedule any time a change has been made.
3. Excel has some pretty simple shortcut features that allow you to copy and paste large amounts of data rather quickly but, so far, I have not been able to find any of this functionality in Access. It would be helpful if there was a way to quickly import what days a pilot will be working into the database so that I don't have to go 1 day at a time and type yes/no (Pilot is/isn't working).
4. Because our pilots can choose from two schedules (8 days on/6 days off or 15 days on/13 days off), I can forecast a pilot's schedule through the end of the year and make corrections as time progresses (when a pilot takes leave or calls in sick or works on his scheduled off days).
Please let me know if you have any thoughts or if you can help get me going in the right direction.
I'm a crew scheduler at a private aviation company with over 170 pilots. I'm trying to use MS Access to develop a pilot database/scheduling system. I have a table of all the pilots that work for our company and I have a table that I've been trying to use to create a schedule for each individual pilot.
The biggest problem I have right now is that I don't know what the best way is to schedule a pilot to a day (or rotation of days) of work. My original thought was that I could have a table that assigns dates to fields; however, Access limits the number of fields to 255 (obviously 365 days in a year so that won't work).
My second thought was to assign dates to rows (records) on a table, then somehow link a pilot from the pilot table to the schedule table field that matched his ID.
I may be getting ahead of myself with some of the notes below, but so that you can gain some perspective of what I'm trying to do, here are some of the things I'm trying to accomplish with this project:
1. I only care about what dates pilots are working - they don't have set hours (8am-5pm etc...) so time is not relevant in the scope of what I'm trying to use this database for.
2. Because we have 170+ pilots, it doesn't make sense for me to have a calendar view that includes the name of every pilot. My eventual plan is to create a form or query that populates a calendar with the days an individual pilot is scheduled to work, then email that pilot with their schedule any time a change has been made.
3. Excel has some pretty simple shortcut features that allow you to copy and paste large amounts of data rather quickly but, so far, I have not been able to find any of this functionality in Access. It would be helpful if there was a way to quickly import what days a pilot will be working into the database so that I don't have to go 1 day at a time and type yes/no (Pilot is/isn't working).
4. Because our pilots can choose from two schedules (8 days on/6 days off or 15 days on/13 days off), I can forecast a pilot's schedule through the end of the year and make corrections as time progresses (when a pilot takes leave or calls in sick or works on his scheduled off days).
Please let me know if you have any thoughts or if you can help get me going in the right direction.