Education in Access

[Kevin]

I am mostly a self taught Access user who has created 4 smaller sized
databases for my employer. We are taking some steps in the future that could
really utilize the power of Access, along with potebntially other software
applications. Self teaching obviously takes a long time, and may result in
many missed opportunities, so I have decide to research possible education
sources where I could get some serious in-depth instruction, whether that be
an applied computer science degree or online courses. It would be primarily
for Access programming at this point, but would at minimum extend to other
Office applications.

Is there any recommendations for what training courses are better/worse than
others? Thanks for any input!!

 

[Ronnie]

I took a course through a local community college and an Excel course through
our local Vo-Tech. Both were very good. Easy to follow step-by-step books!

 

[Roger Carlson]

Your local community college is a good place to start. However, the quality
is variable. I have taught such courses and (cough) they were very good.
I'm sure many of our MVPs have taught classes at some time or another. It
pretty much depends on the quality of the teacher they find. Community
colleges can't always be picky. Look in the syllabus for words like "data
modeling", "normalization", "database design". THEN see how many weeks are
devoted to those subjects. If it's only 1 or 2 weeks, it's likely a general
"how-to-use-Access" class rather than a database design class. Out of my 15
week class, I devoted 7 weeks.

There is a national training company called New Horizons that has a pretty
good database design class. Oracle also has a great data modelling class
that is not specific to Oracle, but can be applied to any database
implementation. Both of these options would likely run you into the
$2000-$3000 range for a week's training.

--
--Roger Carlson
MS Access MVP
Access Database Samples: www.rogersaccesslibrary.com
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