I am developing an equipment checkout system for a university media lab. I have entered all the inventory info and much of the student info (each in a seperate file.) My problems relate to the file for the checkout forms. I think that the best way to keep track of our equipment would be to make a table called checkout with two main parts: the header, which will contain a student's contact info, and the body, which will include a list of the items they checkout. We will use a barcode scanner to check every item out. I would like to have the real name of item appear in a seperate part of the layout but I'm unsure how to do this. For now I just have one field named "items out" and one called "item name." Perhaps I am missing something. Could someone please help me out?

If I understand you correctly, you will just need to relate your two tables, then you can put the name on the layout.

They are related but I feel like I'm missing something. Maybe something small. Maybe something big. Can anyone help???

This is my thinking for how such an equipment checkout system would be structured. A Student table, an Equipment table, and a Checkout table that's a Student-Equipment join table. A Student can have many checkouts. A piece of Equipment can be checked out many times.

You could then run the checkouts through a portal in Student or a portal in Equipment.