I have a series of massive spreadsheets at the office to track people, where they obtained their education, their progress through our corporate training and the bonuses paid to them associated with said training. All of the data could be linked with a SSN. each individual is on multiple sheets and in multiple workbooks due to our current tracking. I am trying to figure out an intuitive way to put together a databse to more easily incorporate the data and run queries.

For example:
a list of all people in Class ### with degrees in Mech E

When candidates X, Y and Z were authorized a bonus and when the results of that authorization were audited

total time for each employee to start and complete all phases of training

I am just having difficulty wrapping my brain around the relationships that I should use to make each table small enough to easily interpret and run queries on and being able to put all of the data that we incorporate into each spreadsheet into a well organized database.

any suggested reading for a beginner would be very welcome

Your first task is to create a master table, perhaps called tblEmployeesInTraining. This would include an autonumber generated by Access, which you would use as your Primary Key, and the employee's name and all other demographics. You would then use the PK in all the other tables (you may want to import the spreadsheets into Access; design of data entry forms is not difficult, and is straightforward) instead of the employee's SSN or name; ergo, you would remove the SSN or name, and replace with the PK from the table.

You already understand that the table tblEmployeesInTraining would have one-to-many relations with all the other tables.

You may need additional tasks, depending on the complexity of the DB. We're here to help.

Sam