Database Project

When our professors said to start this project early, they weren't kidding. Although I thought I had allotted ample time to work through the project and complete it this past week, I soon realized that I would be spending my Friday night finishing up the project, so I could enjoy my Easter weekend. I initially expected Access to be a lot like Excel in the aspect that tooling around with it will generally point you in the direction you intended; I was dead wrong.

This project was a great learning experience for me because I had never worked with Access before. After watching the database lectures (a few times), I finally got to understand the nature of the beast. Some downsides to my trial-and-error technique in order to familiarize myself with the program ended quite terribly as I ended up deleting my database a few times and starting fresh. However, I do think that I have firmly grasped the beginnings of Access. It was great to learn the basics such as creating various tables, forms and reports. I think the greatest piece of information I learned was how to import and export information from Excel, Access, etc. This will definitely help me in the real world as I will be working with Excel on a daily basis. Learning how to make order forms by extracting information from other tables and queries was a tremendous thing to learn because I will be making and placing orders in the field of merchandising upon graduation.

This brings me to my next point. How is Access going to help me function in the real world? Most of my ideas come to mind in the retail industry because so much emphasis is placed on the customer. Due to the fact that Access can take thousands of customers from a database and filter that information, I think this will prove helpful when I am analyzing buying patterns and customer preferences. Additionally, one could also send out coupons to a certain grouping of customers, such as all customers in Florida or all Female customers who have spent $500.00 at Store A Year-To-Date. Even though Access may be challenging to overcome, the possibilities with filtering and analyzing data is endless. It makes me wonder just how many companies are under-utilizing Access as we speak and could really gain perspective on their customers from cold hard data.