Thanks for the input guys. the data is in effect a diary and because of the nature of our business (we rent out sign language interpreters by the hour) so I need to see who is available for use at a glance over a two week period and sometime beyond, we also have 4 people that can be updating the system at any one time and whilst a spread sheet would show the data it wouldn't interact with our booking system which is also an fm DB and it couldn't be updated by more than one person without having to close it and save it and reopen it on a different computer. when we take a booking for our services it could be on 3 different days of the week at 3 different time i.e mon 10am til 12, thur 1pm til 3pm and fri 3pm til 5 and we need to be able to confirm to the caller there and then that we are able to supply for those time slots and I could have 4 people doing that for 4 customers at the same time. File maker lends itself very well to this and has done for 7 years now but Im upgrading from 5 to 9 advanced and because of the complexity and difficulties of upgrading from 5 to 9 i'm re-writting the whole thing. I will try the group rotate route, thanks.