This is an interesting and very useful format for a computer book. It is a presentation of the questions most commonly asked by people calling Corporate Software, Inc. for tech support. Corporate Software, Inc. is a third party supplier of technical support handling over 250,000 hardware and software calls a month. The questions are organized into logical groups creating a different way to find answers to the puzzles that Access can throw at you.
January 8, 1997
The book starts off with the "Top Ten Tech Terrors" obviously the 10 most common questions and, if nothing else, it's interesting to find out what kind of problems other people are running into. The other chapters cover logical subjects like basics, tables, forms, queries, reports, etc. So it's not just a long list of questions and answers. You can find your way around and locate the answers to particular problems you may have. The book is peppered with "Tech Tips" that are useful tidbits of advice that relate to the questions asked by callers such as: "The type of relationship between tables is shown by the characters at either end of the join lines [talking about indicating relationships in the Relationships window]. The 1 appears on the "one" side of the relationship. The infinity symbol indicates the "many" side of the relationship."
This is a useful tool for beginners as well as for database pros. There is some pretty gear-head oriented material included covering abstruse subjects I sincerely hope I never need to know anything about. Even though I use Access for fairly simple small-office purposes, I have questions sometimes about weird messages, things that don't work the way I want them to and, well, I'm sure everybody has a question or two sometimes. I find Access to be a very solid, easy to use program but I'm not always a solid, easy to use person and I NEED ALL THE HELP I CAN GET!
I have two or three of those 4 inch thick reference-type tomes that cover so much about Access that the mind boggles at the sheer audacity of anyone that might think they could learn it all. Those books are handy from time to time but Access Answers is actually readable. It's even fun to browse. I keep one of those 4 inch thick Access books by my bed to help me get to sleep at night (this really works) and for the last few nights Access Answers has been my bedtime reading. I've gotten through many more pages of Access Answers in the last couple of nights than I have of the four inch book that's been by my bed for at least two months.
What does that tell you? I hope to see a bunch more books of this same format from Osbourne McGraw-Hill. They have them available for 1-2-3, Lotus Notes, Word for Windows, WordPerfect for Windows, MS-DOS, NetWare, and Excel.
