While I have been exposed to Access a number of times in the past, I’ve never really applied Access to work…not really sure why, except that Access was always perceived as difficult and Excel is my beast of burden and has sufficiently served my needs. One thing that I learned in this project is that Access is very easy to use, and I’m glad to have completed this assignment as a refresher for how easy it is to set up. The function similarities to Excel makes a transition to Access much easier given my proficiency in Excel. There is one application in particular that Access will serve well at work, and it will be a project implementation for this work year.
That said, there are several improvement recommendations for the project data base. Primarily, data validation in some fields would help control the input for consistency. For example, I applied data validation to the State field, to limit the input to two characters representing the state abbreviation, but it could go a step further and be limited to a drop down list of valid states. In addition, gender and membership type are fields that would also provide great opportunities for input validation to minimize data variations. Applying such limitations on input variations provides for better output in criteria filters and other information slicing and dicing techniques by capitalizing on consistency.
Overall, this has been a very valuable project for renewing in my mind the potential usefulness of Access and how it can be applied to certain data management needs within our organization. More importantly, older versions of Access had the stigma of difficulty in use, but this project has overcome that stigma in my mind. It is a very easy application.
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