1. 

   Eric P. Lacey
   July 29th, 2010 - 12:17

   This is a good book for a beginner. The examples are very good at walking you through the basics. The terminology/screen shots actually match what Access 2007 looks like. Some of the other books out there don’t. Trust me, that creates alot of confusion. This book helps lay the foundation for creating very simple databases. If you have something more complicated in mind, you will need another book. What that book is….I’m not sure. After 2 books, I’m still looking.
   Rating: 4 / 5
2. 

   Allan Bach
   July 29th, 2010 - 13:48

   I teach Access at a local community college. In the past, I used the Access 2003 Step by Step and found it a good starting point. I should have looked at this book before I used it for my Access 2007 class. Not one page is devoted to relationships between tables. The only information is in the Glossary where it is defined as “An association between common fields in two or more tables.” The reader is never told about Primary Keys, other than a mention to “notice the Primary Key icon … to the left of the ShipperID field. The value in the Primary key field is used to uniquely identify each record.” With this kind of detail, the publisher should have saved some trees.

   The examples for importing from various other programs are so weak that they leave the reader with no real idea of what is involved in a real life situation.

   Three people authored this book, yet not one of them ever thought to include the why of tasks, only the how.

   Save your time and pass on this edition. Maybe the editors will look at the shoddy work, read some of the reviews, and find authors who understand Access and can communicate how the program is to be used.
   Rating: 1 / 5
3. 

   Daniel C. Kline
   July 29th, 2010 - 16:04

   This was a great getting started guide. It will help an end users Access from just starting out to intermediate. If you’re looking to become proficient at macros and VBA, this is just the tip of the iceburg, but will still make a good starting point depending on your experience with previous versions of Access. It’s clear examples and companion CD make learning the material easy and straight forward. Unless you’re already pretty familiar with access I recommend you follow along with hands-on. There’s a lot to know about Access 2007, and you won’t remember much without a little practice.
   Rating: 4 / 5
4. 

   Mujahid Khan
   July 29th, 2010 - 16:19

   This is a good book for someone who is starting and wants to create simple databases, which of course will never be used.

   As someone wrote earlier, this book is for parrots or monkeys. It shows you to click buttons.

   However, Databases are complex and this book is no help.

   We need a better book, which explains the details and at the same time is lucid.

   I found that book to be the Missing manual by Mathew Macdonald.

   Don’t waste your money on Step by step. You can get a much superior product for almost the same price of SBS.

   MK
   
   Rating: 3 / 5
5. 

   Sattamander
   July 29th, 2010 - 17:43

   This is a great book for people who want to know where Microsoft hid all the menu options that we were used to. I don’t mean to be belittling to those who thought the book was great but it is clear they don’t know what they are missing, literally. I can’t see how anyone can think they have a well rounded understanding of Access after reading this book. This book sets the newbie up for a big fall flat on their face. No talk about relationships, the only mention of Tabs has to do with the Ribbon bar. Wait until they start moving fields around and wonder why when they hit the tab key their flying all over the page.

   But I guess it is all summed up by the authors cutting their own throats on page 9 under Understanding Database Concepts. They tell you that what makes Access so great is that is a Relational database and not a flat database, but then never once tell you about how to set up those most important relationships. So without that knowledge you are going to be setting up flat databases. For the life of me I can’t understand how they missed this critical process especially AFTER they pointed out its importance. And we won’t even go into normalization of the data.

   And to top it off they drop in VBA code. Scary! Still haven’t figured out what they were thinking there.

   I will admit it takes you by the hand gently but it hides your eyes from a lot of what is really going on behind the scenes. Guess that is why the authors give you so many different versions of the same data base, so they could load the deck in their favor. I fear newbies will be in for a real shock when they try to replicate what they thought was so simple,(and was), in this book.
   Rating: 2 / 5

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