All I know is that it’s a “database management system”, and I don’t even know what that means! I have tried fooling around with Access and have gotten nowhere. Where do I start and what is the purpose of this?
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So, ever found yourself looking at a spread sheet where you need to enter a bunch of the same information a hundred times? Maybe you’re making a list of all the voters in the county/state, and you need to include information like where they’re allowed to vote, based on where they currently live.
Every single person in the list is going to have an address. It’s going to include a street number, a street name, and a town and postal code. And once you know that, you’ll know their polling station, which is another address. And a LOT of polling places are going to be the same, because groups of people go to the same one. But on a spreadsheet, where all the data is looked at all at once, you’re going to have to enter that information for. Every. Single. Person.
That’s called data duplication, and it sucks. It sucks because it takes more time and effort on your part, it sucks because it increases the chance for you to make a mistake and accidentally tell someone they’re being polled at the wrong address, and it sucks because it makes your file massively larger than it needs to be – and thus, slower to use, and more expensive to host.
So, you want to save time and effort and space, and make less mistakes along the way. The easy way to break down the polling places by town, and say which ones are within which towns – Then I only need to write the polling places’ addresses once, and anyone who wants to can cross reference the address of someone on the list with their polling place.
This is why databases are called relational – I identify a bunch of variables, and then break them down into the data about that particular variable, and only that variable… and then put all that on a table. Then I give that table a way to be referenced easily, and can omit work, effort, money, and mistakes when I refer back to it.
So – I make a table that is about People, and a table that is about polling places. The polling places table has NO data about people – but the people table has a single entry under each person that says polling place number is… and then an entry. Now I can sort my people table and send out the right ballots to everyone who lives within a specific area. And, if someone mistypes, and says someone goes to polling place 532 when there are only 400 entries on the polling place table – it is easy to see the issue.
This is what Access is and does – it is a tool that allows me to build multiple related tables, and minimize all the associated issues that could crop up if I were entering the same data multiple times. It is actually a fairly powerful tool, once you learn to use it – but there’s a lot of details about database architecture that you’ll have to learn, and a lot of planning you have to do, to make a useful database.
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