Week 12 Unit 3

As I mentioned last week, This week I have completed producing my lists and had started to begin my mail merge letters.

First of all, I produced my last list which related to the different dietary requirements. The aim of the list was to return results which included all students with dietary requirements so that there was a record of this and all students with specific dietary needs were identified. I could've accomplished in two ways;

1) add a criteria which identifies all students with dietary needs as a whole or..

2) add a criteria which sets up a pop up to appear so that the organiser can search for more targeted dietary needs. For example if they were looking for vegetarians, they would type that in and the results would be as follows.

I found is very difficult to pick between the two methods which I had later on sort out by producing both and examining as to which was better. This can be seen as follows; 

The screenshots shown on the left are representing the second option. This has meant I have to create one query with 4 different sets of results which I thought was more thorough and specific.

This, on the left was the first option which was all the dietary needs in one query all together. There was no specific order excluding  'ascending'.

Hence, I decided to go with the second option as it was more targeted although this first option was easier and still achieved  milestone 5 (for 2b select information) overall. The screenshots on this page show that I have successfully achieved this criteria alongside with the criteria of considering alternative ways as I have done. (shown on this page).

I had also created one of the mail merge letters which was milestone 1 for this section which asked me to send out information on the prom to all the parents. I had achieved this and had used the relational database tables to do this. I had imported the contacts into Microsoft Word and then added in all the details of the prom. My letter is shown here which confirms my completion; 

I have added;

- event date

- venue

- eating arrangements

- themes

- permission slips

- prom cost

and other arrangements.

Difficulties: I didn't understand how the mail merge system worked so I had to spend some time fiddling about with the system so that I could get use to it and experiment. I did this with a different set of records so that I didn't get confused.

Moreover, I had to get the formatting of the letter correct so that it looked professional. I did this by looking at other letters and identifying the different features within it and incorporated them into mine.