M9620 - I have been a [something else] with MS Access as part of my duties until recently where it is my only duty.
The as-hoc, or as I call them "quick and dirty", solutions will impress because you can produce usable results almost as quickly as you are asked for them.
I suggest you sit with the users if you can to see how they use the application then reverse engineer it to see what tables / queries are used to populate the interface. After you gain this familiarity with the data, your job will get easier to navigate.
I will be finishing the last lesson in Sam's Teach Yourself SQL in 10 minutes. I suggest you take some time with it. I've been playing with VBA since 1996, serious since about 2008 and programming in Access the whole time. Now that I have a SQL server BE to work with, learning T-SQL has helped performance greatly. There is a lot in this book that will be remedial but the new stuff has made it worth while.
Good luck and welcome to the forums!