Check box summary

[Closet Gnome]

Hello everyone; I am relatively inexperienced in FileMaker and running a very old version (5.5). The database I am working with was set up to help run a school event at the museum I work for. Students and chaperones get free t-shirts, and the mechanism for these at present is a field "shirt size" with checkboxes for each size (Youth S, M, L, Adult S, M, L, etc.)

At present, the record layout is for each school, who can have multiple students; each "student lastname" + "student firstname" listing is followed by a series of 9 checkboxes, 1 for each size, and we put a check in the size shirt that each person needs.

There are fields at the bottom of the record that say "Total YS" "Total YM" etc., but at present they are text entry only; it seems that last year they manually counted and entered the numbers. I'd like to set up these "total" fields on each school's record so that they automatically calculate the number of T-Shirts in each size that each school needs, based on the checkbox selections, as well as a grand total of all t-shirts for the school.

I would also like to set up a summary report that tells how many shirts in each size that we need to order for all schools, to make it easy to place the order with the shirt company. However, this is complicated by the fact that, because schools come back from year to year, rather than creating new records for each school per year, my predecessor set up a "Years Participated" field with a checkbox for each year (the value list is 2006-2010, which will be a problem in 2011 as this is a permanent event), and checking of multiple boxes enabled. I would need to narrow the T-shirt ordering report to only tally those records with 2008 checked.

Is there any way I can do all of this with the database set up as it presently is (with no other related tables or databases, and the only other layouts being a form letter and mailing labels), or would it be better to rebuild it in a different fashion? Or are such calculations even possible in this older version? We'd like to keep it as simple as possible, as we only use it a few times a year. The reference books I have at work (a Visual Quickstart guide for v.5.5, and the FMP Bible for version 4, oddly enough) are not clear on how to set up the calculations I need for value lists within a single field. There were posts with similar situations in earlier threads, but there didn't seem to ever be a clear-cut solution (at least, one that I can understand with my very basic FMP experience!). Sorry for the length--I figured better to include detail than to eliminate it--and I greatly, GREATLY appreciate any insights anyone might have! Many thanks.

**edit: When mentioning that we only use this database a few times a year, I didn't mean to imply that it is unimportant! The event we run is one of our biggest and most popular ones. In addition, my predecessor set up other databases (that we use much more frequently) in very similar fashion, and we'd like to be able to apply similar calculations and reports to those as well. :

Edited February 27, 2008 by Guest

[Fitch]

1. Do a Find on the "Years Participated" field for 2008

2. Make a Summary field that is the Count of StudentID, let's call it ShirtCount

3. Make a Subsummary report, i.e. a layout that has a subsummary part when sorted by Shirt Size, and put Shirt Size and ShirtCount on this subsummary part.

4. Sort by Shirt Size

5. Preview or Print

I'm not sure about step 1 because it's not clear to me what the relationship is between students and schools, but that is the gist of it.