Full Disclosure – I Owe My Career to Access
I’ve been working with Microsoft Access off and on since 1997, just a few years after it was first introduced in ’92. I can realistically say that learning Access made my career in I.T.. I’d had some previous programming and database experience with Borland Paradox and an older DOS title so I had some idea of what I was doing when I decided to automate some of my work with the copy of Access 97 that I.T. had installed on my machine with Office.
I spent the next few years creating Access apps and learning about things like normalization and report design. I started out using Access macros, tentatively started playing with Visual Basic for Applications and then started creating sophisticated Access / VBA apps for other departments and facilities within the company. I started a website in 2000, wrote about Access and offered some samples for download. A few pages of introduction to Access that I wrote for a friend became a series of articles titled “Microsoft Access for Beginners” which brought a lot of web traffic and then became a book that didn’t sell very well but was appreciated by those who read it. In 2003, I took on my first Access client as an independent programmer. In 2005, the expertise I demonstrated with Access helped me get my first full-time programming job with Access and other languages. It’s continued from there.
