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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A database management system is basically a program that will store data tables (think excel sheets) in an organized or structured way. These then let you “join” two or more tables in a handful of ways based on shared data between them. Namely, column A of table 1 contains area codes and column c of table 2 does, too. You can join these tables and see data from both in a single row when both tables have a record for that area code. In general, the idea is to save you from doing a lot of filtering or searching in each table independently
If you’re looking for a place to start, I damn near guarantee there’s a better platform than access. That said, access is good at a few things.
Forms – allows restricted user input in a weak gui. Better than just free text entry and creating the forms gets easier the more you do it. This is my favorite access feature
Connection to a more robust database with an “online database connection” or odbc – access is slow on even moderate sized databases, so you’re usually better off working in one language of sql or another and establishing a connection to stream data between them
Graphical query construction – a query is a way to search a table for surviving information. Access (and several sql flavors) allow you to do this by dragging and dropping tables into a graphical display to create links between them, choose columns (fields) to display or filter on, and modify the output.
Ultimately, I try to stay away from access like the plague. MySQL is free and does all the query stuff access can do (might not have a free gui, so you’d need to learn the syntax). Sql server management studio (very not free) is like access, except no form creation (to my knowledge), it’s faster than access, and you can do more with it, it even has a query design gui like access.
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