When you hear the word “database,” do your eyes glaze over? Does the mention of fields and tables make your blood pressure skyrocket? Does the idea of entering and using hyperlinks make you hyperventilate?

Whether you’re running a business or a household . . . whether you need to be able to quickly access customer information, your recipe for chicken cacciatore, or the Little League team’s records, Access 2003 holds the key. This friendly guide unlocks the secrets of using Access 2003 to store, manage, organize, reorganize, and use data! It gives you:

The basics of the whole database concept
Suggestions for solving problems with Access
What you need to know to design, build, use, and change Access tables
Info on the ten most common types of fields
The scoop on using queries to unearth the answers hiding somewhere in your data
Guidelines for using the Access report system to make short work of long, previously time-consuming, reports

In the relaxed, comfortable For Dummies style, this book has easy-to-follow, step-by-step instructions and lots of screen shots. If you want to create and manage a database for a huge auction house, this guide will get you going . . . going . . . gone. If you want to create a database for your music collection, it gives you the score then shows you how to use formatting and add graphics to jazz it up. You’ll get the low-down on extracting all kinds of information from databases and putting that information to practical use. You’ll discover how to:

Use Label Wizard to create mailing labels, file labels, shipping labels, or name tags
Use Chart Wizard to create line charts, bar, cone, and column charts, pie and donut charts, area charts, and XY and bubble charts
Use Auto Reports to create columnar or tabular reports and then fine-tune them
Export reports to Microsoft Word and Excel
Get your data Web-ready and put it on the Internet in either static or dynamic form
Build forms with Form Wizard

And speaking of high-tech fun, Access 2003 For Dummies even tells you how to install and use speech recognition software with Access 2003. So if the idea of working with databases has you talking to yourself, this is just the book you need.

John Kaufeld