[ale] OT: slightly

[Scott Castaline]

I need help/advice in an attempt to through something together that'll 
work in a mixed environment. It's something to help my wife in her job 
as an independent contractor to the Early Intervention Program in 
Gwinnett. As nobody in the program is too sure as to the future of how 
things are going to operate or not, I don't want to invest a lot of time 
in it and I ain't got da' money to pay for anything. A clue to the 
future is think back to the last Gubernatorial campaign ads, anyone 
remember one of Taylor's ads showing an Adaptive Wheelchair empty 
sitting in a dark room? Well that's what is currently happening to the 
program. Sonny says all is well, the contracted agencies for the state 
are making money. Well, yeh, they collect money from the state and hold 
off paying service providers. More speech therapists, physical 
therapists, etc are leaving the program because they are accumalating 
expenses in providing these services to clients and not getting paid.

Well sorry for the rant, on to my problem. I have started to help my 
wife with the billing side and have noticed that there are several steps 
that could be bypassed by a fairly simple app. She currently enters all 
her info into spreadsheets, that she is always having to manually 
reformat due to the inflexibility of this method. She currently uses 
about 3 or 4 different templates for these reports/files. Then the two 
of us have to sit at our PCs (her's Windoze, mine FC6)while shee reads 
me dates and clients so that I can reenter this data into my 
spreadsheets for billing.

I started with OpeneOffice Base using the wizard to design the tables 
and then the forms. I can't seem to design a form that will allow me to 
enter data into a secondary table while displaying a record in the 
priamary table. What I came up with is the primary table is basically a 
modified address book. One secondary table is probably like an item 
record in an inventory db, while the other is similar but, has more 
fields with the possibility of adding some logic to the form design. The 
relations would be in each case many records in the secondary table 
relating to one record in the primary.

I think I have the db structure ok, but it's the form and report parts 
that seem to be the problem.(?) If anyone can advise I'll be more than 
glad to send you more details off list.

TIA