Welcome to Access World! We're so happy to have you join us as a member of our community. As the most active Microsoft Access discussion forum on the internet, with posts dating back more than 20 years, we have a wealth of knowledge and experience to share with you.
We're a friendly and helpful community, so don't hesitate to ask any questions you have or share your own experiences with Access. We're here to support you and help you get the most out of this powerful database program.
To get started, we recommend reading the post linked below. It contains important information for all new users of the forum:
Building your own database is the best way to learn. Start out small, build something that helps you in one particular area of your business, the part of your business that would benefit most from the database.
After that you can start adding extra useful bits.
To make sure it all fits together nicely it's a good idea to explain exactly what you envision your database will do. Post that here and ask for critique and you will get some!
It's very easy to build a database in the wrong way. If you do build it wrong, it will work, up until it doesn't and when you get to that stage, it's an almighty pain in the proverbial to fix.
I wrote a blog about it here. (Most people are transitioning from Excel to ms Access)
Excel in Access - Problem & Solution! One of the most frequent problems I see is people confusing MS Access with Microsoft Excel. This leads to fundamental design errors. Now, the problem is, this error "A Major Error" does not become apparent straight away. Unfortunately your database will work...
Uncle Gizmo's advice is good. To learn Access, don't start with an overly ambitious project. Start small and build on it.
Since you admit to having a big learning curve, I'm going to offer you a suggestion on something useful to read. In this forum, you can search for the word "Normalization" and get some useful articles that contain useful references. If you take that search to the web, you must search for "Database Normalization" because there are at least six different non-database subjects that ALSO discuss normalization - e.g. math, chemistry, and diplomacy for three - and there are others. IF you go for a web search, you'll get hits all over the place. Look at a few of the .EDU domain hits first, only because the .COM domains on the subject often have something to sell you.