Access® 2007 For Dummies®

Introduction

You've picked up this book and are hoping it will teach you to use Microsoft Access. Of course, as the authors, we believe that it was some sort of divine intervention that led you to our pages, and we're quite certain that this is The Book For You. We could be wrong, but that happens so infrequently that we're hardly considering it. No, the reason you picked up this book is that you want to learn Access, and this is the best place to do that. Really. No kidding.

Of course, being a normal human being, you probably have work to do, and whether we're right about this being The Book For You or not, you need Access. You need it to organize your data. You need it to store and allow you to use all the information that's currently spilling out of notebooks, file drawers, your pockets, your glove compartment, everywhere. You need it so you can print out snappy looking 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 that the data was entered properly, so 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. You just need it.

About This Book

Because with all the power that Access has (and that it therefore gives you), there comes a small price: complexity. Access isn't one of those applications you can just sit down and use, “right out of the box”. ...