What's the best way to teach Microsoft Access to yourself?

There’s plenty of resources to be found when Googling for “microsoft access tutorials”.

Here’s the first result, which is a great resource. I’ve used it in the past.

The #1 best way to learn it is to get deep into it and muck around. It’s not really that hard of a program, and is much easier if you know about databases to begin with.

I’d also recommend looking in your library to see if they have Access help books or guides – since Access has been around for a long time, the chances of them having such a book are very high (at least in my town’s library this is true).

Thanks for the link since I was looking for “tried and true”. You can’t get that from Google I don’t think.

Sure you can. Google’s entire algorithm is based on such a concept (if it’s tried and true, more people will link to it, thus increasing its rank).

In general, for any computer program, it’s worthwhile to google for its name and “tutorial” and see what comes up. That’s how I learned pretty much everything (HTML, photo editing, website creating) before I attended university. Plus, sometimes you find little communities, forums, where people are program experts and are willing to answer your questions for free.

Depends whether you know SQL already or not.

I don’t.

Oh, you don’t know SQL? I would then strongly advise you to get a book, something like Microsoft Access for Dummies, not saying you’re a dummy but these books are geared to people who have zero knowledge to begin with. The “Visual QuickStart Guide” book series is also very good at explaining starting with very little knowledge.

Thanks! (So much for googling then!)

You can certainly learn SQL for free via Googing though ;)

@Mr_M and @dynamicduo – The “for dummies” books are usually very good and are actually just a catchy title meaning “for beginners”. If you don’t know SQL, you might also consider reading a brief introduction about RDBMS and the relational model for database management, see

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_model

The “For Dummies” books are great! Especially if you don’t know anything about the subject.

I prefer the ‘original dummies’ books that were/are out, to the newer versions or authors who have tried to copy that idea. So you might want to look at different authors to see which book is the best for you.

Just my thoughts. I learned database in college but it was before Access and I found Access difficult to figure out myself….so good luck. In fact, now I would have to get a good book to learn it, but when I tried in the past I couldn’t even figure out what they were talking about in the book I had.

Years ago I had on-the-job training but when you don’t use it, you loose it with that program.