At the moment my co uses a spreadsheet to note how many orders each
engineer is assigned and this is updated manually. I've thought about
transferring this to Access and have thought of two possible ways, 1 is
clearly better then the other but goes beyond my Access knowledge.
If anyone cares to have a read I'd appreciate any feedback.

Each particular order may have a number of sites and this is also
noted. The orders allocated per engineer is simply allocated as they
come in

Method 1
--------------
Create a form in which all the relevant details for each order (ie
engineer, number of sites) are inserted and this acts as a new record
for each order. Stats can then be extracted using a number of reports
and queries. This is a very simple approach but having a record for
each order is quite unnecessary as we only need a count of how many
orders and sites an engineer is working on.

Method 2
---------------
Enter the details in a form and on the click of a button, the values
entered on the form will be added to a table setup with the engineers
for each day. This way there will only be a max of 28 records per day
as we have 28 engineers.

Woulkd anyone have an idea of how to use numerical values entered into
a form to update a main table by simply adding the figures?

I hope this all makes sense.
Thanks

For starters, what you can do is to create your base table. Add all the
data fields you want to collect. You can make the first column an
Autonum column (an Identity field) - you can name it something like
IDnum, then add a Eng_Name column (engineer's name) as a Text column,
maybe they all have ID's - Eng_ID As Number (or Text if Alpha Numeric),
.... and so on, and finally a date column for the respective date
EntryDate As Datetime.

Next you go to forms, New and in the dialog box at the bottom select the
table you just created. This will be your data entry form. The form
will be based on this table. In the design view of the form on the top
side of the window go to the first toolbar. In the middle of the
toolbar, you will see an Icon with the planet Earth, and to the right of
that are 2 more icons, one looks like a Notepad, and the other is a
toolbox icon. You are interested in the Notepad looking icon. This is
the field list of the table you just created. If you hold your mouse
over the icon, it will say "Field List". Click on this icon and you
will get a list of all your table fields. If you click on the top of
this list, it will highlight the entire list. Drag this highlighted
section to your form and release the mouse button. The fields will now
be placed on your form. Now you can drag the fields around as you need.
When you enter data into these fields, the data will automatically be
entered into the table. This is called data entry form. Please forgive
me if you already know all this.

In your date field, you can add a function like =Date() to the default
value on the properties sheet of the date field. To get to the
properties sheet, just right-click on the date field (right click on any
field to get to the property sheet). There is a row in the property
sheet that says "Default Value". This is where you enter

=Date().

Now the current date will be entered into that field for each record.
For today, today's date gets entered. For tommorrow, it would be
tommorrow's date. If you need something different than that then you
will have to add/write a little bit of code in the field's After_Update
event. But hopefully this will get you started. If you need more
assistance,just post again.

HTH

Rich

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Once you set up your basic database as Rich P gave instructions for,
you can customize it to do exactly what you want it to. For example, in
Method 2 you could delete all the records in your table before entering
the first record for the new day, and then (since you only want a count
of how many orders and sites per engineer) input engineer name/ID,
number of orders to add, and number of sites to add. When you wanted to
get your stats on the engineers, you could run a query that would sum
up the number of sites and number of orders for each engineer.