Constructing a form to track student attendance

[khch]

I'm trying to develop an application for tracking student attendance. I want to list the students names for a class at one side (left side) and a grid for inserting the student status (present, absent, late etc.) to the right. The grid cells contain combo boxes to assign the status for the student. The grid column headers contain dates from 1 to 31. The form should look like this:
Class....................Month
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
......................... Day1 Day2 Day3 Day4 Day5 Day6 Day7...DayN
......................... 1.......2.......3.......4.......5.......6.......7....28/29/30/31
StudentName1...Cbo1 Cbo2...............................................CboN
StudentName2
StudentName3
.
.
StudentNameN
Note: the dots(....) are just added to make spaces!
Class is a combo box for choosing a particular class
Month is a combo box for choosing a particular month
CboN is a combo box containing the status types (Present, Absent, Late, etc.)
The StudentName list comes from a table from another database.
I really need tips, ideas, examples, readings, refernces for building this application. Every information will be welcomed and appreciated.
I have basic / medium knowledge about access.
Thanks very much

 

[striveforexcelence]

from an end user standpoint i was wondering a couple of things.....first.... who is going to input this data? teachers? if they have many students and/or many classes this is inevitably going to become a mundane process and that leads to incorrect information either not entered for a day or entered 5 days at one time etc. You will need a LOT of buy in from the users on this for any kind of credible data. You might have a paper list given to a data entry person....or at the least you might consider limiting their input so that at the end of the day they might combo box a class which would then allow a combo box student name with autofill so they only have to type a couple of letters presumably and make it so they would only enter the abberant information i.e., make the default for each student present and then the data would only be altered for late or absent which could be a check box or button and save all the combo. or they could even just type in A or L. just a thought.