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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How familiar are you with Excel? Excel is great for working with tabular data, that is data which can be described as rows of entries with columns of the same kind of data for each entry. You might have a class of students. Each row represents the grades for each student along with their name and student ID number. Each colum might represent a particular assignment or exam. Now, what if you needed to store data like that for a whole school? You could have Excel spreadsheets for each class, but how would you handle individual student records from the different classes? Jimmy Smith is taking both physics and English, but he is also on the football team and he is supposed to ride the number 10 bus home. All that could be stored on several spreadsheets and someone might be able to sort through it, but it is better to build a database which is where Access comes in. In Access or other database managers, you can store several tables of data along with the relationships between them. You might have a master table of students and other tables for class rosters or the football lineup and you can cross-reference them using key values like student IDs. A problem you might solve in the school scenario I laid out is determining the academic eligibility of players on the football team. From the tables that we already have, you might have Access automatically construct another table that only contains students listed as members of the football team who have GPAs lower than 2.0 or who are failing any one class. Learning how to manage databases may only make sense if you have data to manage. You might need to find an example dataset to practice with
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