Is This Book Meant for Me?

I wrote this book so that, equipped with a knowledge of relational database theory, you can successfully use all the key objects in Accessboth individually and togetherto manage your business and personal information needs.

This book is aimed at readers who have run Access before but don't feel confident using it. Perhaps you've read one of the "for-morons" books. You have created some databases and entered data into them. But you work in Access with hesitation, even trepidation. You don't have a good idea of how you should organize fields into tables. You have read about primary keys and relationships, but you really don't understand how they work or why they're so important. You have created a form or query or report, but you don't recognize how each interacts with its underlying table(s) and with each other. You've used wizards to create forms and reports, but when you want to modify them, you're stumped. You want to enter data easily, retrieve it freely, manipulate it successfully, and publish it with a little panache.

I don't want to oversell. This book should be sufficient if your Access needs extend to inventorying Butler's book collection, or perhaps even running a small, simple business or association. If you are using Access for a company or organization of some size and complexity, however, this book won't tell you all you need to know to design robust Access databases on your own. But it will give you the broad understanding of the major issues that need to be addressed. If you do require the services of database designers and Access programmers, you'll be much better able to understand what they are doing. You'll ask good questions and provide good answers to those posed to you. In short, you'll be a much better client, which means you're much more likely to get a more effective and productive database.