Can a person work more in more than one shift?

Do you understand normalization? If not, you might want to search the web to find some good information on creating good table structures. I don't expect I would create separate tables for Operators and Maintenance. Employee certifications should be stored in a junction table.

Duane
Hook'D on Access
MS Access MVP

Some employees do work more than one shift, just depending if they get called in to cover for someone who is out. I'm wanting to do something, so when the time stamp can tell which shift should be working, it only lists the people that are supposed to be on that shift, so no one can enter a work order request under someone else's name. Honestly, I just did a two week crash course on access, I'm really not great, nor do I understand all the aspects of it, but it just got thrown at me, so I'm rolling with the punches right now

Those sound like three different entities to me. There is the temptation to try to jam them all into one table but try this structure

tblEmployee
EmployeeID          <-- Some unique identifier for the employee
EmployeeType        <-- Ideally linked to some table of types 
                        like 'Operator', 'Maintenance', etc.

tblEmplCertification
EmployeeID          <-- Link to the employee table
Certification       <-- Describes what certification they have
                        (should also be in a table of 'legal' certifications)
Other fields such as date certified, expires on, etc.
if those are required.

tblEmplShifts
EmployeeID          <-- Link to the employee table
Shift               <-- A shift number perhaps
                        (Provide details about the shifts in a Shift table.) 

With that structure you can easily report certifications for operators or shifts for maintenance people and you need to enter only relevant data.

I suggest you review some information at Crystal Long's tutorials particularly 3. normalizing data.

You need to start with your table structures. Build something and post back here with your tables, fields, and relationships for some feedback. Don't worry about anything else until you get your tables correct.

Duane
Hook'D on Access
MS Access MVP

I must agree with Duane. In my brief layout I omitted some of the jargon about primary keys, foreign keys, indexes, relationships, normal forms and the like. You do need to know that stuff though and the reference Duane gave you is an excellent place to start.

Have a look here:
http://r937.com/relational.html

Hope This Helps, PH.
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