Learning about access

June 30th, 2009

I have never had any training with the Microsoft office programs, everything I know I have learn though trial and error and generally messing around.  From the main programs in Office there is only Access I have never used so had no idea how to do anything on it.  Because I like learning how to do new things I took the chance while at work to mess around with Access to design a task list for jobs that need to be done, who is responsible for doing them, and when they need to be done by.

So I loaded up Access thinking that is can’t be too hard to get to grips with.  The only database I have ever used was during me GCSE IT course which was quite a few years ago and on Acorn computers.  Acorns were not the most advanced things, they were very slow and nothing like what we have today, so loading up access brought back no familiar memories to help me along.

I used me normal method of trying to use something, clicking on things to see what they did, and after a few attempts I got a table up with the columns I wanted. I even used the lookup wizard to make tick boxes appear for the responsible people column.  I still wasn’t happy though, I wanted it to be quick and easy to use.  I wanted it to fill in boxes for you, like if you tick the completed column it puts the date in the date completed column for you.  I tried and tried but got no where, so I fell back on the person that knows everything, my Dad.  Dads are great for this I think, if there is ever something I am not sure about then in just a quick phone call I know there will be someone that knows.  I don’t know how they manage to be experts on everything, they just seem to.

Well I have spent a couple of hours explaining what I wanted to do and he has actually come up with a solution.  Access is the most complicated thing I have ever seen, it can probably do everything its just working out how to make it do it that’s the problem.  I am going to stick with it until I have learnt at least the basics, at them moment I am embedding a table in a form, for reasons I am not quite sure about, but I’ll learn something from it any way.

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