I know Excel like the back of my hand but I am having to learn as I go with Access.
Welcome.
You may have already worked out some of this stuff but I thought it would be good to mention.
One difficulty Excel power users sometimes have when coming to Access is having to forget about the structure of a spreadsheet and change their thinking to related tables. It can be counter-intuitive and there are two important fundamental differences to keep in mind.
Unlike Excel where data storage and presentation is integrated into a Sheet, Access Tables only hold data while presentation is done in Forms and Reports. Consequently information one would sensibly put in adjacent cells in a speadsheet may be distributed across multiple tables. It can seem crazy to a human brain but it is what works for the machine.
Secondly is the realisation that a table is very different from a data-only spreadsheet that might look exactly the same as that table.
Tables records have no intrinsic order or relationship to each other. The familiar concept in Excel of comparing a value to one in the previous row is not straightforward as it is in a spreadsheet.
The main thing before you get into designing databases is to thoroughly understand normalization.
Another important point is to avoid difficult to access data strucutres. Though technically not normalization per se, it is vitally important to make sure the data is as accessible as possible. We get many questions here where a new developer has painted themselves into a corner a long way into the project because they didn't understand this aspect of design.
In this regard, alarm bells should ring loudly when you find yourself building a table with repeating field names like something1, something2, something3. The queries to work with this structure are often become a nightmare.
