general overview

[webfaktor]

Hi,

I have been away from designing, developing and managing Excel/Access Databases for a few years and I am now looking to involve myself with them once again.

I would like to expand my marketability. The purpose of this query is to see if forum members herein might provide me suggestions on logical/natural next steps I might take in training myself (given my aforementioned skills with access and excel) whereby I might approach this growth in my marketability.

Putting this query another way; what fields of pursuit have Excel and Access Database knowledge as prerequisites?

Advance thanks,
Webfaktor

 

[jrbarnett]

Hello

For Access I would suggest brushing up on general relational database design, normalisation and SQL skills if you need this.

Access on its own is only usable for small scale systems, so skills in a back end client/server database, probably SQL Server could reap rewards in terms of scalability and security.

In both Access and Excel I would get to understand VBA code and in particular, the ADO object model as this provides an interface that can be used to communicate with database engines such as SQL Server and other sources of data such as CSV files, Excel spreadsheets.

Finally, with the general aim towards web enabling applications, general web development skills including HTML/XHTML, CSS and Javascript, plus one of the common web language platforms such as ASP.Net or PHP (depending on the server platform you wish to use) and how to connect them to your database engine to read and manipulate data.

John