Access For Dummies

Introduction

Welcome! Thank you for selecting this book. We assume you’ve done so because you’re hoping it will explain how to use Microsoft Access, and of course, as the authors, we believe this was a wise decision. We, the authors, 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.

So what was it that made you seek out a book on Access? It might be that you’ve been asked to use it at work, or perhaps you run your own business or are managing a nonprofit organization. If any of these is the case — or if you’re just a regular human with a lot of personal contacts and irons in the fire, you need Access to organize your data. You need it so you can find a name or a transaction in seconds after a few keystrokes, not after minutes spent scanning your spreadsheets or swiping apps this way and that on your smartphone. 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.

About This Book

With all the power that Access has (and that it therefore gives you), there comes a small price: complexity. ...