First, I think that you realize that in order to record that level of deatail
(attendance of each student for each day of each course) means that you will
creating/ entering a lot of records.    

Your "horizontal" day by day display requirement pushes this towards a very
wide report and away from what would be considered to be good databased
design and a typical database application and easy ability to do "by student"
summaries.   But this would do it:  Make a table which lists students.  
Including a Primary Key StudentNumber field

Make a table which lists the courses, the hours for each, and a primary key
Class Number field.  

Make a table which will have a record for each instance of enrollement of a
student in a course.   Two of the fields will be StudentNumber and
CourseNumbeer.   Link the to those two tables accordingly,   And make a field
ffor attendence for each day of the year that you want to record.  (hopefully
less than 250).   Forms and reports that you are looking for could then be
easily developed from that.   Set the controls in the report to display "P"
when that "cell" is empty/null.  

A better structure (bt which would not format the printout as you describe)
would be to still make those 2 Student and Cour4se tables, but, instead of
that third one, make a table which   has a record for each instance of a
student being absent or tardy for a class on a date.  This table would have
only 3 or 4 fields.  CourseNumber, StudentNumber, Date, and the box with the
"T" or "A"  
 

Just an idea:

Assuming you have a table named Calendar containing every class date.

Assuming you have a junction table named StudentClasses joining Students and
Classes.

Assuming you have a table named StudentClassAttendance, which only has data
for the days a student was absent.

This creates an attendance record for every class day for every student for
every class. (could be a lot of rows)

INSERT INTO StudentClassAttendance
          (student_id,
           class_id,
           calendar_date,
           attendance_code)
SELECT StudentClasses.student_id,
      StudentClasses.class_id,
      Calendar.calendar_date,
      IIF((SELECT COUNT(* )
           FROM   StudentClassAttendance AS a
           WHERE  a.student_id = StudentClasses.student_id
                  AND a.class_id = StudentClasses.class_id
                  AND a.calendar_date = Calendar.calendar_date) = 0,
          "P",(SELECT a.attendance_code
               FROM   StudentClassAttendance AS a
               WHERE  a.student_id = StudentClasses.student_id
                      AND a.class_id = StudentClasses.class_id
                      AND a.calendar_date = Calendar.calendar_date)) AS
attendance_code
FROM   Calendar,
      StudentClasses;

TRANSFORM First(StudentClassAttendance.attendance_code) AS Atten_code
SELECT StudentClassAttendance.student_id, StudentClassAttendance.class_id
FROM StudentClassAttendance
GROUP BY StudentClassAttendance.student_id, StudentClassAttendance.class_id
PIVOT Format([calendar_date],"Short Date");