Access 2000: The Complete Reference

Access 2000: The Complete Reference confronts the least intuitive element of Microsoft Office 2000 and does an admirable job explaining how to use its numerous tools and features. Intermediate and advanced Access 2000 users--as well as people upgrading from earlier versions of the database program--will appreciate Andersen's comprehensive treatment of her subject.

Access 2000: The Complete Reference opens with a quick overview of the program's most rudimentary functions before stepping back to discuss relational database concepts. Andersen then documents Access 2000's data manipulation features, including the tools for establishing and manipulating relationships among tables. Readers also get a full rundown on building good queries.

Data presentation comes next: The book covers report creation--with and without the Report Wizard--and goes into depth on creating and editing graphs. The coverage of PivotTables--being both extremely powerful and rather hard to understand--could be more extensive. There's also a considerable amount of text dedicated to Access 2000's abilities to publish database information on networks and a little bit on Visual Basic as it applies to Access.

Throughout, Access 2000: The Complete Reference presents its documentation as a mixture of prose, stepped procedures, bulleted lists, and tables. A companion CD-ROM includes a quiz program that gauges the skills of people interested in taking the Microsoft Office User Specialist (MOUS) exam on Access 2000, plus the sample files discussed in the text. --David Wall