Access 2013 For Dummies

Introduction

Welcome! Thank you for picking up this book. We assume you’ve done so because you’re hoping it will explain how to use Microsoft Access 2013. And of course, as the authors, we believe this was a wise decision. We’re quite certain that this is the best book for you to use to understand Access 2013 — but not just because we wrote it. Rather, we base this belief on the fact that both of us have been teaching and using Access for a very long time, and we know how to share what we know with our students. That’s right, you’re now one of our students — at least that’s how we feel about you as our reader. Doesn’t that make you feel all warm and fuzzy? We hope so.

Of course, being a normal human being, you probably have work to do, and you’re probably juggling a whole lot of information. This means you need to use Access. You need it to organize your data. You need it to store all the information that’s currently spilling out of notebooks, file drawers, your pockets, your glove compartment, your smart phone, your brain, everywhere. You need it so you can produce reports that make you look like the genius you are. You need it so you can create cool forms that will help your staff enter all the data you’ve got stacked on their desks — and in a way that lets you know the data was entered properly so that it’s accurate and useful. You need Access so you can find little bits of data out of the huge pool of information you need to store. So that’s it. You just need it.

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