Hi,

I'm trying to design a simple database in which I can keep track of the
amount of time my 5 technicians spend on various jobs.

At the start and end of each particular job (could be 5 minutes to
several hours), they punch a time clock.  So, at the end of the
day/week/month I have a boat load of time cards with their hours for
each job, which I enter into an Excel spreadsheet.  I'm pretty good
with Excel, but know that there must be a better way.  For instance, my
spreadsheet takes forever to open and save because of its size.

I've been playing around with Access and have set up a rudimentary
database.  It has 2 tables:  It looks like this.

Table 1: "Techs"
   Field 1: TechID (auto number primary key)
   Field 2: TechName

Table 2: "Jobs"
   Field 1: JobID (auto number primary key)
   Field 2: Date
   Field 3: TechID (linked to TechID field in "Techs" table
   Field 4: JobNo (job number related to the particular task)
   Field 5: TimeOff (time job ended)
   Field 6: TimeOn (time job started)

So, it's pretty simple, but here's my problem.  Each tech has lots of
entries for a particular date. And since I don't do data entry every
day, by the end of the week there's a decent amount of data to enter.
I'd like to not have to type the date for each record and I'd also not
have to type the TechName for each record.

In other words, I'd like a data entry form where I can set the Date and
TechName just once and only have to enter the JobNo, TimeOff and
TimeOn.  Then, when I'm done with one tech, I can move on to the next
tech and still not have to change the date.  Finally, when I'm done
with all of the entries for one day, I can move on to the next date.

Any suggestions on how I would set this up?

Thanks in advance for any advice.

Regards,
Nelson