Summary data?

[technoranger]

I have a database that, among other things, tracks referral of students to special education by 24 individual schools - 1 record per school. Up to now, we're tracked gross numbers by grade (preK, K, 1 - 12). I could pull out that Uptown Elementary referred 14 students in third grade, while Downtown Elementary only referred 5 students in third grade. Now I need to break that out further. For each of the 14 grades, a referral can be made in one of 15 categories (01 - 15).

Is there an easier way than making 210 separate fields (preK01, preK01...g1215) to generate data for a report that could say that "Uptown Elementary referred 14 students in third grade, 5 code 04, 8 code 09, 1 code 14" ?

Can a field, e.g. Grade 1 track sub-data in 15 categories without creating a new record for each referral?

Rick

[Fitch]

Why not a new record for each referral? Put new records in a related file. Then, in the school file, just use Sum() or perhaps Count(relatedBySchool::students). Or, just do your reporting from the related file. If each record contains, school, grade, and code, you could easily create a report with subsummary parts for each field, so all you'd need is the corresponding three summary fields. (This assumes that you only have one code per student. If that's not the case, it's a bit more complicated.)