Introduction

Overview

Microsoft's Access development community has grown to 600,000 members or thereabouts, and they form an important part of the several million developers that develop Microsoft Office solutions. Access plays key roles in the Microsoft Office suite by allowing us to rapidly develop applications that store, query, exchange, and report information.

Access 2002 is used typically in the following scenarios:

• Small-scale functional applications (Fixed Asset Register, for example)

• Knowledge Management systems

• Decision support applications

• Supporting client-server and Internet applications, perhaps as a front-end to SQL Server databases (via Access Data Projects)

• Exchanging data in popular data formats (for example, XML)

From this list, you can see that the types of programming opportunities available to you are broad and varied. As you gain experience, you may be developing the schema of a database, exporting data in XML, developing a suite of reports to be published on the Internet, or using Access to seamlessly front a large SQL Server database. This book will give you the skill set to begin all these types of jobs.