Thread: Learning Access 2007 - help ?

Turns out Google is my friend after all..

Free Access 2007 Tutorial

A Quick Guide To Get Started With Microsoft Access 2007

Microsoft Access 2007 Tutorial?Free & Online

http://www.reading.ac.uk/web/files/i...sBegin2007.pdf

http://www.reading.ac.uk/web/files/i...sInter2007.pdf

2007 and 2010 are quite similar to use.

The reason why Excel is the world's favourite database is its easy to add and manipulate data. Unfortunately it struggles with quries combining the contents of several tables. It also can end up being resource hungry, a 80MB spreadsheet I converted ended up at less than 800K, with all sorts of bells and whistles, in Access.

Access is hard to learn, you need to have some form of programming bent to get the most out of it. Once you have an application, however, any dummy can use it without fear of breaking something (as they can easily do in Excel), data entry is throufgh forms, can be validated etc. Queries can be used to extract information, formatted in the way the designer intends.

If you are prepared to put in the yards you will find Access to be a good product. If not, you'll find it to be daunting and ultimately frustrating.

So far I'm in the "daunting and frustrating" mode.

One of the keys to using a relational database is to create your data structures at the beginning, before you start enterring data. You will need to normailise your data. In effect this means working out what data might have repeated values and moving these to their own table.

Decide what format each data will be stored in, I try to limit the number of data types to avoid the data mismatch errors. Odd as it seems, store numbers as text unless you have to perform calculations. This applies particularly to things like postcodes.

Once you have created your base tables you can create lookups for repeated items that have been moved to another table. For example, If you have decided to keep an adress table seperate to personal details (a person can have more than one address, and an adress can be used by more than one person so it can be repeated) you can ctreate a lookup for home address, another for delivery address, another for invoice address etc, that all point back to the address table.

Once you have your tables you can create data entry forms based on the tables. The forms can add data to different table if necessary. For example, a personal information form can be linked to tblPerson (personal information) and tblAddress.

HTH

Increasingly thinking I'd be better of spending my time screwing a corkscrew into my eyeball as opposed to this.

G'day!

I've been playing with Access database for years, from "Access 97" onwards. I've never needed more that the internet for help and examples of what I've wanted to do. My ongoing database creation is the main tool in our team at work for work flow and document management, and has lots of funky automation and integration into emails, etc.

My advice is to just keep playing, and the internet is definitely your friend...

Cheers!
Michael.

Vlad,

I've got an "Access for Dummies" type book in electronic format (38 mByte). I also have the same for MS Project, Excel & Word, plus AutoCad).

If you want a copy - PM me an e-mail address and I can send it to you via a download link for big files.

All the MS books I have are for 2007 version - but the principles are still the same. I'm currently trying to get my head around databases as well - not bad on Excel but a lot of what I have been doing for years in spreadsheets really should be in a database, and our work is moving in that direction as well, so I suppose I have to catch up.

Sent a PM instead...