How did you learn/what direction should I take?

[kbrooks]

Kind of an off-topic question here. I'm wondering, purely out of curiousity, how many self-taught Access users we have here. I am one of them.....I know much more than what I started, but know MUCH less than most of the regulars here.

Also, being self taught, where should I go to learn more? I know very little about VBA, or SQL, or code writing. Should I learn those first? Or just learn as I go? At my job I have a report writer program where I write queries to pull information from various systems, and I have that language down pat. But I think it's kind of unique to this program...it's similar to SQL, from what I can tell, but there are many differences.

Sorry if I'm rambling, I just want to know more about all the ins and outs of Access and I'm not quite sure which direction to take. Classes are out for now, for financial reasons. TIA

 

[chewy]

I am self taught. I took a class in school, but didnt learn much in it. I didn't think it was important at the time. In retrospect I wish I had learned as much as I could. But alas I had to learn basically through trial and mostly error and a lot of help from this forum

 

[Rob.Mills]

I'm totally self-taught. Well, I mean I've never taken a class. I've gotten ideas from others, though. I started learning much more rapidly when I developed a basic understanding of SQL and VBA. The book I used for VBA is 'Access 2000' by Susann Novalis. That was really helpful to get me up and running. As for SQL I've learned mostly by creating queries and then looking at the SQL that it writes and just studying how the changes I make affect it. That and studying the help file.

Being part of this forum has helped me a whole bunch. There's people on here that have given me ideas I would never have thought of. That's probably where most of my education has come from.

 

[KevinM]

I'm self taught too.

Been doing it for about five years now and it's paid dividends.

I started off where I work as a storeman (8 years ago) and am now in our IT department where amongst other things I have developed well over 50 databases, including some crucial ones like student exam mark calculations, of which I am quite proud of.

So stick at it. If I can do it....anyone can