Week 10: Clear: Access Database

I've only used Microsoft Access Database a little in the last couple of years with no experience with it previously.  I had to teach myself everything I could because I had to set up a database for my job at the VA Hospital in Gainesville, FL (and partially Lake City, FL).  I was creating a database to keep track of their equipment and my boss hoped to use my database as a stepping stone to making it a hospital wide policy (and, with any luck, a VA policy in general).  The system that they have is an old Linux program that is out of date and in serious need of updating.

Anyways, from this course, I was hoping to learn a little about relationships and macros in this week's module.  It appears that that won't be taking place until next week.  Everything from this week's lesson I had learned myself from books and the Internet (Yay Google!).

The basic template of creating a table was rather simple.  It was pretty much like using Excel with a few different categories.  I enjoyed the ability to create fields and the manipulate them as I saw fit to only be able to have Numbers or text or even attachments.  My favorite was the attachments because with the above database that I described for the VA, they wanted to be able to attach pictures of the equipment to the item number.  This ability to create a field like that was extremely useful in that situation and would be also useful in many other situations.

Forms were a unique experience.  Forms are like trying to make a webpage in a way.  You try to make it as clean and flowing as possible so as not to distract, but draw the eye.  I played with colors, variations on the field name and many other things.  It was definitely interesting, but, again, things that I had learned already by myself.

I'm definitely excited for next week.  I'm hoping this class will help me better understand relationships in Microsoft Access.  They are a complete mystery to me and I'd like to be able to have a full grasp of Access for when I go out into the job market.  Being able to manipulate and create databases is an extremely useful skill to have.

Here is a picture I created of my example database that I did for the VA, I smudged serial numbers just to be safe:

Image created by Chris Guderian