Re: Learning Microsoft ACCESS

[Bonnie Granat <bgranat -at- LYNX -dot- DAC -dot- NEU -dot- EDU>]

Thanks to each person who wrote me offlist and on.

I am one of the editors charged with learning ACCESS (MA). Our manager was
on vacation this week and left instructions for each editor about the week's
priorities. Learning MA was marked "Critical!".

I and the other editor similarly charged spent some time trying to make
sense of MA by using Help, beginning a database, and otherwise looking
around. However, both of us are only somewhat conversant with how relational
databases actually work.

We need to do everything but write VBA at this point. It didn't take us long
to see that MA hides any helpful information for beginners. While the visual
introduction tends to give the impression that the program is new-user
friendly, the regular Help appears to be talking to highly experienced
people.

Someone said a half hour would be needed to get the basic idea, but I still
don't even know where to LOOK to find information about how tables should be
set up.

My goal in posting was to have some hard information from MA users about:

-Whether it is reasonable to learn it on our own (both of us never worked
with databases before and have only fuzzy ideas about RDBs).

-Whether it is _possible_ to learn it on our own in a hurry (which is what
"Critical!" implied to me.

-Whether we need to tell our manager that the most cost-efficient method of
learning MA is taking a course, buying a book, or something else.

---------------------------
I have MA for W95 at home and use 97 at work. The Help seems very similar
and I am at home now looking for some instructions on how to design tables
(rationale -- _something_). No success so far and I'm not learning other
things while I'm looking because I don't know what they are talking about!

Thanks,
Bonnie Granat
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