Before I start, can i apologise if this is in the wrong area of the forum. I didn't know where else to put it.

I'm a complete newbie to filemaker (teacher in my spare time) and i'm trying to setup a mark/grade book to store all of my pupil's marks in. The problem is that I could really do with some advice on the best way to structure it. I have 18 pupils and I will give each a grade for each piece of work we do. The problem is that i need to add new pieces of work as I go along. I can't just setup 15 fields for 15 pieces of work. I might end up doing 20 pieces. I hope this makes sense.

I'd be grateful of any advice.

Well you should at least start with one table that stores your student info and another table that stores your assignments and grades.

Using 15 fields is a big no-no with relational design. It violates what is called 1NF or the first normal form.

Also you may want to include a year field in your students table so that you can see your students on a year to year basis. If you possibly have students that you can get in multiple years (1st-2nd grade) then you will want to further expand your database to accomdate a seperate table that stores yearly specific info.

Also, FileMaker already has a starter solution on their website for K-12 education. I have not used it so I cant speak for it, but you should still try and do it on your own at some time just to learn if you wish.

http://www.filemakertrial.com/k-12/?ovmkt=O5M3PJVLTCEPQBRRJ5TP70JVUO

Thanks for your reply. I did look at the Filemaker K12 Starter Kit but even though it claims to have a solution to track grades, I couldn't find anything that did that in the kit.

As for building my own, I'd love to learn how to do it. I just wasn't sure how I should arrange the data.

You need (at least) three tables: Students, Assignments and Grades. The Grades table is related to both Students and Assignments - each Grade record holds the grade given to one student for one assignments.

See here for something very similar:

http://www.fmforums.com/forum/showtopic.php?tid/180113/

http://www.fmforums.com/forum/showtopic.php?tid/183639/