Hi ..... if anyone can help with this i will be eternally greatfull, i just can't seem to get my head round it and am hoping that someone out there will be able to assist.

I have to create an allocation sheet, or chart, that visually depicts the allocation of seats between the hours of 08:00 and 21:00 in any given day.

I have a table with the employees name, seat number and start time and finish time.

Every employee is allocated a seat but when one person finishes work someone else will sit in that seat for there shift.

In short given the basic data i have i need to produce some sort of report that when looked at will show if any seats are unoccupied at any point in the day and at what times.

It sounds simple but its not .... Please Help!!!

I've done this before with student housing in a college dormitory. The data looked something like:

Name: Dorm: Room:
John Durbin Houghton 11
Mike Jones Houghton 12
Steve Pike Houghton 13
Dan Meyer Houghton 14

Create a report that "looks" like the layout of your floor or cubicles or whatever. Then within each "seat" or cubicle space put a subreport that only contains who will be in that particular space.

In my example above, suppose I had a sheet of paper and each corner was someone's room. In the top left corner I would have a subreport that used a query that had as its criteria "11" for room 11. In the right corner would be a subreport that used a query that had as its criteria "12" and so on for the bottom two corners. When you print the report each person will appear in the room assigned to them. I've done this with dorms that had 40-50 rooms per floor and two or three people in each room. So what if there is 50 subreports because it provides a beautiful graphical display of your table data. Let me know if you have any questions...JD

Attached is a version of the same thing as the previous attachment only I added the beginning and ending time of the people. I hope it gives you some ideas...JD

Thats highly appreciated ... i will take a look at that and let you know how it goes, have to admit i never thought of doing that way .... Cheers

Subreports are underutilized I think because people usually just think of using them in "child and master" kinds of ways.

Years ago I needed a way to turn a table that was filled with schedule information into a monthly calendar. I discovered that I could create seperate subreports for each day of the week (Sunday, Monday, Tuesday...) and make the week adjust in size based upon the content of the schedule.

Follow this link to see the example: Expanding and Contracting Calendar .

Enjoy your day...JD