collecting summary data

[Lougee]

I'm tracking student participation in an after-school club for a grant-funded program and funders require lots of statistics to back up our reports such as the number of years students (and faculty) stay in the program.

I have a 'contacts' table with basic information (name, address, contactID#)and participation information in an 'activeYears' table with one record/person/year related by contactID. A portal on the 'contacts' layout shows member participation -- one record/year. Works great.

Now I need to summarize the information shown in the portal -- in other words, show total years each person has participated. That's easy too; 2 fields in 'activeYears' -- one to count the years such as -- if (active = "yes", 1,0) and then a summary field 'yearsTotal' will give me the total years by member. Placing 'activeYears::yearsTotal) on my contacts layout shows exactly that.

The problem comes when I want to search for members with 4 years partipation or 7 years or 11 years -- you get the idea. I can't search in a summary field and I can't get totals in the 'activeYears' table.

What am I doing wrong/not understanding/missing?

[John Mark Osborne]

Have you tried creating a subsummary report yet?

[Lougee]

Seems I was looking at this from the wrong direction -- from contacts to activeYears. It works when I use a layout based on activeYears.

I have a LOT to learn, believe me! And I thank everyone for their patience and help.