InfoQube IM - Community

Submitted by david1904 on 2009/01/30 18:23

I have a list of individuals, some entered as members of a family, others as single individuals.

Each week of the year, most, but not all, are in attendance.

I want to be able to record the date for which each individual is present without having to enter data for each one as separate entries. In other words, how can I enter an attendance date for each individual "en bloc" and then just edit the few who were not present?

From time to time I will need to add new individuals to the list as it will not be static.

Any ideas?

Thanks,

David

Comments

If I understand correctly

Can you select all the individuals (items) and in the properties pane add the date to the relevant date field

You will be prompted to confirm and that should be it

Another way would be to select all the relevant date cells in the grid and paste the date in (once) - it should paste into each cell

Hi Tom,

Your suggestions work well for where you want to update an existing field for an item.

What I want to do is add 20 or so items, most of which may have 1-5 sub items, and then for each subsequent week, record the date present for each of those items and subitems.

Some of those individual will be attending other groups/events with their own attendance records, plus there will be other individual events recorded against those items (as distinct sub items) which will have their own date stamps.

Hmmm, as I think about it perhaps I should filter the grid based on 1 dummy date with everybody present - then perhaps I could copy and paste the whole group, and then select and modify the date for that week, then edit those who were absent...

I'll see how I get on.

Thanks for any other ideas,

david

- no, that won't work as it will create new entries for the highest level items, when I just want to have attendance dates as sub items (or sub sub items) for the individuals concerned

IQ is not a true relational database system (even if based on a relational database engine). The abstraction is part of its power. Not being a true relational database however has consequences. It is not well suited for such an application.

However, could you not invert the logic and still get what you want. Organize your info like so:

Grid Events
Each item is an event. All event details are entered once for each event. Copy/paste can be used to duplicate events
As a sub-item or in a Attendants field, you enter the list of attendants
If you want to be able to link back to the contacts, the list can be a hyperlink to the corresponding item
If you want to be able to compute the attendance of each person, you can create an item per person. Copy/paste items from a previous event subs would make this simple. Use the pivot table to compute event and attendant statistics
You could also use the multiple parents feature, to put the same contact item under many events, but I don't think that the pivot table will report the correct numbers

Thanks Pierre

I might need to stand back a bit and think through what I want to accomplish.

Maybe I should be looking at an Excel list or an Access database with links.

Maybe I should be using Excel as a temporary storage and then cut and pasting a table with a months worth of info into a html field for each item.

The overall aim is to have everything about everything stored in one program/file and then be able to slice and dice and analyse it all - while still having good access to the free form text stuff - might be just a tad ambitious

I'll think through the concept of inverting event and attendees.