Book Review: Doing everything with MS Access

How to Do Everything with Microsoft Office Access 2003 by Virginia Anderson


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
In reviewing a book on how to use a computer program, I suppose the most important point is whether it helps one to use the program effectively. There was a time when buying a computer program included a substantial user's manual, but no longer. Most programs come with rather skimpy manuals, and one often has to buy a third-party book to fill in some of the gaps.

This book is mistitled. It does not tell you how to do everything with MS Access. It tells you how to do some things, the basic things. It is a beginner's guide, and to the extent that it is that, it does it fairly successfully. It doesn't tell very much about how to use Visual Basic for Applications, which one needs to do to produce all but very simple database applications that can be used by other people. So the title is misleading.

I found it generally useful, but there was one serious flaw. It describes a sample database application for creating tables, queries and entry forms. But when it comes to reports, it works on an entirely different set of hypothetical tables, for which no samples are given in the text, and they are onyl described very sketchily -- a police database. This makes it very difficult to see how the reports work, when one cannot create the tables on which the reports should be based. This is a serious flaw, so I can't give the book more than two stars.

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