New to Access (1 Viewer)

I'm new to Access but not to databases.

We just acquired the assets of a company and all of the data is in a single Access database. It was used to run the entire company, which was just two people who have been publishing a directory for 25+ years. We have the Access 2003 database. I have opened it in Access 365 and saved to file in the newer Access 2007 format. The owner and single employee of the company have retired but their database programmer is only in semi-retirement and we can hire him to assist us. There is no documentation and the 2 people internalized all operations after many years to doing their jobs. The data is good, but there is a ton of reports, and I suspect other objects, that haven't been used in years and I will have the previous programmer help be identify what can be thrown out of the database.

To make life more complex all data entry was done in the 1992 DOS version of Informix and then the data would be imported into Access, so the previous owner isn't used to do data entry in the Access version, and does a very important export for directory publication in Informix, so I have to find out if this export has been written in Access. I won't know for 2 weeks since the programmer is on vacation.

I don't understand some of the data structure since there are 3 version of every table (e.g. address, address_empty, address1). My suspicion is that I will have to learn how this database works and then rewrite it from scratch. Also, this database has content, orders, payments, etc in it, much of which we want to move to an off-the-shelf database and only have the custom aspects in a custom built database.

So, that is my less-than-stellar introduction to Access. I expect to post many stupid and basic questions here.

Welcome aboard!

Welcome to the forums!

Feel free to ask stupid and basic questions for the next 89 days. On day 90 you will be limited to stupid and complex questions only.


(Also: the pot luck is mandatory)

Thanks to everyone who has helped me with Access. I am getting more used to it. Part of the problem is simply that this database is a 28 year old design (yes, it predates Access) and there are so many oddities. For example, I was looking for orders for subscription to a web site and I learned the previous owner simply handled all of that accounting outside of the database. We had no idea.

The database is written so there is one database with all of the programming and one with all of the data, just as recommended by a member here. While an outside programmer is doing all of the programming work I am doing reports as needed and writing new queries. Bringing stuff that I've worked on into the new programming database is easy enough. If there is a need for data changes I ship the file with the data to the programmer to work with it over the weekend.