I hope someone can help. I'm very new to Access, so please bear with me if this is a foolish question.

I have a table that currently shows the people who went to a series of training events:

Date (PK)
Person 1
Person 2...

Up to a possible 17 people per event.

What I want to do is create a table that shows which dates each person attended. The people are listed by ID number, not by name.

Is that possible? It seems like it ought to be simple but I'm tearing my hair out.

Yes, you can do this, but it is a LOT easier if you do it differently than you are doing it:

A people table, containing AT LEAST a unique identifier for each row, plus the name of the person, other fields are possible as well

An event table, containing AT LEAST a unique identifier for each row, plus the name of the event, other fields are possible as well

An Attendance table, containing AT LEAST a unique identifier for each row, plus a people identifier and an event identifier, other fields are possible, such as the date attended

I would put data in these tables by developing a main form that displayed the data from the people table, on that form I would place a subform control that displayed the data from the attendance table for the selected person. The event table would serve as the row source of a combo box to facilitate data entry.

P. S. None of this stuff is simple. You get better as you go along, it is true, but it never does become simple, only simpler.