I'm a beginner at all of this - so sorry if my question is in the wrong place or is a repeat of past inquiries (I tried to find something like this in the archives but was not able to).

I work for a contracting company and am trying to come up with a solution for creating a calendar layout for the jobs we are installing. Most of our jobs take a minimum of two days. I have fields in our customer database for "Start Date" and "Completion Date".

We have been recording a visual journal in Excel. It consists of columns which are assigned to an installer, and then each row represents one day (which is nice because we can see 3 weeks worth at once, and schedule things out accordingly).

I am trying to come up with a solution for how to create a layout in Filemaker that will look similar to this. I thought perhaps inserting portals that will have the same date searched in each one (each portal being for an installer, and set up in rows across the layout), but am not sure how to mimic the Excel layout (where each row represents one day). If a job of ours takes 3 days, is there a way to have the 2nd day (which is not the start or completion date) be represented in such a calendar search?

Now you could tinker with the views to contain this 3 month aspect by modifying this template:

http://www.fmforums.com/forum/attachment.php?attid/7281/

...found in this thread ...it does provide some measures to deal with recuring events as well as events stretching over several days.

But the tread as such is a great read to anyone considering a calendaring solution, because it contains both almost too healthy relational considerations as well as tool specific hacks.

--sd