Many-to-Many Relationship

[hindsl]

I'm having trouble getting started with designing a database for an annual conference I work with. We currently use excel and word merge docs for our schedule and speaker listings, and I'm sure Access would be a much more simple and easy way to handle this. My problem is that some presentations have 1 speaker, some have up to 7 or more. We have multiple concurrent sessions over 4 days. Some speakers only present once, some present in multiple sessions. The basic information we list in our program is date, time, session title, a short description, and the speaker's(s') name, title, and company. How can I set up the table relationships with so many variables?

 

[hindsl]

To explain further: I was going to set up one table for Presentations, one for Speakers, and one for Location (I left that out above-we use 3 different hotels with many meeting rooms in each). Each presentation will have only one location, obviously, but could have more than one speaker. And each speaker could have more than one presentation.

 

[Pat Hartman]

Here's a basic stab at what you need:
tblSpeakers - information about each speaker. Probably include a short bio to print in the program.
SpeakerID
FirstName
LastName
BioMemo

tblLocations - information about each location - you could expand this with another two tables so you can track AV equipment and where it is.
LocationID
BuildingName
RoomName

tblSessions - description of each session.
SessionID
SessionTrack (allows you to group sessions into tracks or bands)
SessionName
SessionDesc

tblSessionSpeakers - Junction table to associate speakers with sessions.
SessionID
SpeakerID
LocationID
StartTime
Duration

If sessions repeat or different speakers may present at different sessions, the schema will be more comples.

 

[hindsl]

Thanks, that's very helpful. Different speakers can participate in different sessions, though, so as you mentioned that complicates things... any suggestions?