Managing a lot of checkboxes (2003)

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Edited by HansV to shrink humongous screenshot

I have students with disabilities who get accommodations for several courses in one semester. I have a form that I fill out for each class and I use checkboxes to signify which accommodations they are eligible for each course and what they can use on the test in that course. I also ask a bunch of other questions on a paper form that I transfer on to my Access form and, again, use a lot of checkboxes. When I transfer this over to a report, I am finding it difficult to format the list of accommodations that I have checked. These could be multiple and might change depending on the course. I have attached a screenshot of what I’m talking about.

In my research to fix this problem, I have seen the use of multiselectable listboxes (didn’t read that this would be very good to use) and subforms. I tried the subform out, but not sure how to format it so that I can choose more than one accommodation and more than one thing they can use on the test (i.e. calculator, textbook, etc.) How can I do this and not have to enter the course and the semester multiple times? I tried creating a separate table which has ID, Accommodations, Course, Semester, but then I would need to enter the course name several times right?

I know that the way I have it currently designed is not the most efficient but cannot figure out a way to make it better and would appreciate your wonderful genius minds to help me.

Jodi

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You have a many-to-many relationship between students and accomodations: one student can use several accomodations, and several students can use the same accomodation. The “official” way of handling this is by creating an intermediate table in which each student – accomodation combination is a separate record, containing the student ID field and accomodation ID field.

This setup means that you should use a main form and subform to enter data. See post 364,203 for a sample database demonstrating how to use such an intermediate table in a main form – subform setup.

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Thank you so much. Your example was extremely helpful and I was able to do what I wanted.

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I get the feeling that you a recording all the information on your form in a single-table situation; it doesn’t appear that you have a normalized database. It is hard to tell what information is specific to the student, which is specific to the course, and which is specific to the occurrance of the student talking that course. At a bare minimum there should be 3 tables: Student table (student name, general accommodations that always apply, etc.), Course table (course name, instructor, etc.), and a Student-Course table (shows special accommodations the student needs for this specific course above and beyond the general accommodations).

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