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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If you have limited knowledge of computers with data structures and data management a spreadsheet might be a place to start.
You can keep a list of contacts in a spreadsheet in excel or google sheets.
Col1 | Col 2 | Col 3
Name | Cell | Email
So the first column you put their names , then cell number followed by email. Now in excel there are endless columns and rows, in Access you define exactly what data you want to store.
Now perhaps your friend has a list of people with addresses that he send you over to you. So now you have 2 tables (or data collections) that have a common field of Name. So you could import that data into a new spreadsheet and manually look for common names. The real power of a database is that allows you to join datasets on common fields and perform searches, calculations, etc. To do this they develop their own languages, and most are based on SQL. Microsoft access as I remember also have some graphical UI abilities to automate it a bit.
But in the end you could create a command to combine the two (SQL statement in most databases).
This barely covers anything, but any database is just a place to efficiently store data for later searches and calculations.
P.S. Never (or knowingly evaluate) use a spreadsheet as a datastore unless it is for your own personal use. I used a spreadsheet here only a very simple structure/application you might be familiar with.
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