Introduction to Microsoft Access Databases

The First time you open Microsoft Access it is a terrifying experience. It is as if you just landed in a foreign land, unable to speak the language or understand the signs, which leads to confusion and frustration.

You probably start by click on a few of the symbols to see what they do. Soon realising that you have created a mess, afraid that you might somehow completely destroy something, you grow numb and helpless.

The months that follow lead into a growth of confidence, but that irritating feeling of helplessness seems to never go away. Symbols that just do not do what you tell them, a dot missing and somehow having such power as to paralyse your every thought and ability to create a magnificent database.

The journey is not helped at all by the teacher who seems to not speak your language. He talks to you as if you are expected to know everything from day one. He speaks about formulas and constantly growing irritating seems to order, just get on with it.

The learning curve is made steeper than it needs to be and the experience prolonged unnecessarily.

In the many years of educating and being educated the above scenario is hardly unfamiliar. I was constantly being congratulated and reminded, if only there could be a tutorial which explains so clearly and concisely how databases work and illustrate it.

Databases are like a child. So cute and willing to do whatever you tell them, only if you knew how.
Learning how to communicate with a database is not hard at all, what makes it unnecessarily hard is the way they are taught, which is why I wrote this tutorial.

Unlike in other tutorials, especially academic textbooks, where you are constantly taught concept after concept and then expected somehow to connect the pieces together, this tutorial will take you through a step by step approach into building a database and through the way explain how things work.

They give you pieces and ask you to build a wall. This tutorial will build the wall with you and on the way show you how each piece operates. Starting with planning and ending with testing it will guide you through the making of queries, reports, formulas, even some visual basics.

It has been proven times and again that this method cuts and even bypasses the learning curve as you will experience yourself.

Hence let's start shall we?