ICT help desperately needed!

[MistyDragon]

For ICT coursework, my sons have to create a digital system to manage customers, bookings and pitches for an imaginary 5- and 7- a-side football company. They have been given csv files for the customers, pitches and bookings. The system should allow users to to view information and generate reports on pitch use and customer bookings.
It then requires the boys to create a spreadsheet that will automatically generate invoices based on bookings and customer information stored.
The boys are really struggling and I have NO idea of how to help. I have tried to look at Microsoft Access and Excel but do not know which is best (easiest) and then, what steps to take.
Any guidance would be appreciated.

Use excel not Access. Excel can open up the csv file.
I'd probably have the different csv files as tabs on a single Excel file and then consolidate data into a new tab.
Tell them to look at pivot tables and functions like sumif, countif etc.

Blimey. That does feel like a lot. They presumably haven't got to find a way of automating getting the data into Excel, so step 1 is just to get all three files in as separate tabs in one workbook as @Whyherewego says.

Then for generating the invoices you're maybe meant to do a drop-down list or slicer list of customers, you pick one and it displays the information for that customer? You can indeed use a couple of pivot tables (say one for the customer details and one for the pitch use invoice lines) connected to the slicer, or you can use FILTER and similar array functions in Excel - see Excel guru and all-round legend Leila Gharani for details:

And the reports are presumably a chart and maybe a pivot table as well, to summarise the details of pitch usage and so on. I think I'd start with the reports and work up to the invoice as it doesn't sound like the reports need to be dynamic, i.e. change based on some user selection.

Thank you so much for taking the time to respond. I feel so stupid...it may as well be in Russian 😥I think I could open up the three csv files on different tabs in one spreadsheet (although I know in reality I'll need to watch a help video just to do that!)

I shall certainly try watching the Excel Guru. My poor boys say they are just sat looking cluelessly at their computer screens (and they aren't the only ones) in the lesson while the teacher just sits there pretty much refusing to help.

Okay well don't start with that video I shared as that is something quite complicated.

It sounds like the boys might be better saying they can't do the homework. Or maybe just having a go at the reports on usage, which are much simpler.

Open the 3 CSV files in Excel.

In the first file, choose File --> Save As and choose a place to save the file (it will probably default to Documents). Make sure below the file name to change the type to Excel Workbook (*.xlsx). Give this file a name like Project - this is where all the data is going.

Then on file 2, right click on the sheet name at the bottom and choose Move or Copy. The dialog box will have a drop down list called 'To book' and in that you can choose the Project Excel file you just created. Same for file 3. That's all the data in one place. Now save the file and close files 2 and 3.

Then I would choose one of the pages, put the cursor somewhere in the data and go to the Insert menu and choose 'Recommended charts', see if it comes up with anything reasonable. If there are a lot of rows of data it probably won't, and you need to use a pivot table to summarise. Will link below to a video on pivot tables.

Okay here we go - getting started with Pivot Tables:

@tribpot instructions are spot on. If the boys are really struggling then tell them to focus on 1 dataset initially. So play around with the pitches dataset and do a pivot table on that so they get used to it.
Then once they've got the hang of how to do it on something simple it may be easier for them to add other data in.

Side note I'm delighted in fact kids are learning this stuff, it makes me weep at work when people can't use excel for basic tables and add things up on calculators instead (yes really).

Also they could ask Chat GPT or Copilot for assistance!

If it’s coursework, there will be an official specification for it that you can look at. There will also be course materials from the teacher. There are loads of ways to do this, even in Excel, and not all of them will meet the requirements of the coursework.