​Like MS Word and Excel, Microsoft Access has tricks for searching and navigating records. Following are some of the more commonly used filtering capabilities and keyboard shortcuts.

​Are you interested in learning Microsoft Access? Download the sample Northwind Access database. Microsoft built Northwind as a fully functional and fictional database, you can explore, test and learn about the following:

​Yes, you can use Microsoft Access as a frontend to your MySQL database. MS Access is not limited to pairing with Microsoft SQL Server.
 
Microsoft Access is an exceptional tool for building user-friendly database applications. Access is one of the top selling rapid application development tools on the market. The programming tools Microsoft includes in Access mean less code writing. This reality just simply saves programming time. In addition, average users can learn to do basic things with their own data because they can use wizards instead of writing code.
 
However – there are still a lot of misconceptions about MS Access capabilities. One of the biggest misconceptions is that Access can only be paired with Microsoft products like MS Excel or SQL Server. These misconceptions are just simply false. One of the things that makes Access such a great user-friendly data management tool is its ability to integrate data from a wide variety of sources. Your organization is not limited to using MS Access with only Microsoft products.
 
It is not uncommon for smaller organizations to use open-source data management tools. MySQL is one of the more often used open-source database applications. And – yes – you can use MS Access with MySQL. Following is one example of how a small organization might make use of pairing MS Access with MySQL.

​Data evolution can be related to data integration, but it contains other components. Unlike data integration projects, data evolution projects build a new core database from multiple sources of data. Typically information from spreadsheet applications or various database/software applications is actually merged into one dataset. The goal of a data evolution project is to decrease the number of data sources and increase efficiency.

In 2014 I wrote the LinkedIn article: If you're looking at OFFICE 365, and you use Microsoft Access, look harder. At the time, Office 365 fell short of my expectations, mostly because of its treatment of MS Access. Initial publicity about MS Office 365 promised the ability to move MS Access databases to their cloud server. But, as my clients moved to Office 365, we discovered Microsoft promises of cloud capabilities for MS Access were inadequate. Complex Access databases could not be used from the cloud platform without major revision.

​Over the years folks have asked me about using MS Access in a remote environment. In time, using a remote desktop setup surfaced as the best remote environment solution for MS Access.

One of the biggest misconceptions business folks have about Microsoft Access is that it is going away. Many people are under the impression that Microsoft no longer supports Access, or that Microsoft plans to jettison Access altogether. This is simply not true.

One of the largest misconceptions about Microsoft Access is that it’s expensive. Many people operate under the assumption that if they build a data management solution in Access, that every user will need a full version of Access installed on their machines. This is a wrong assumption.

​Microsoft provides a runtime version of Microsoft Access. It does not cost anything to download and install Access runtime, on user machines. If your organization builds a multi-user Access application, you would only need to pay for the full version of Access for administrator/developer machines.

​One of the biggest misconceptions about MS Access, is that it isn’t a secure database. To be fair, the misconception has some grounding in fact. If the MS Access database is using native tables, then it isn’t any more secure than an Excel Spreadsheet. But, this is a simplistic understanding of the issue. Following are some things to take into consideration, about data security and the use of Microsoft Access.

One of the biggest misconceptions about Microsoft Access is that it can’t handle complexity. In regards to a multi-user environment, many professionals continue to operate under the paradigm that MS Access doesn't work properly in a multi-user environment. This assumption is an unfortunate and costly mistake.

​i’ve worked with MS Access since version 2.0 back in the Mid 1990s. I’ve watched Access go through all the various upgrades and transformations. I also have extensive experience with SQL. From experience I can tell you that Microsoft Access serves many of my clients very well in a multi-user environment. MS Access is a tool. And like any other tool, it has to be used properly. So, there are best practice protocols to using MS Access, but there are best practice protocols to developing in any other database software as well.