I have a concept and I want to run it by a few of you. I've talked about this idea with Alex, and he thinks it's a good idea.

If you're familiar with Choose Your Own Adventure books which were very popular back when I was growing up in the 70s and 80s, it's a style of literature where you read a little bit of the story and then make a decision. "To follow the left fork in the road, turn to page 89. To go right, turn to page 94." And by doing this, you control the narrative of the story.

My concept is to do something like this, but with training. Let's take Access for example, which is what most of my lessons are about. You're a new user, so you watch the "Introduction" video and get a brief background about Access and what a database is. If you don't care about database concepts and theory, skip on to getting start with Table Design. Otherwise, more theory lessons are available.

Next up: Table design, which gives you a choice. "If you just want to build a simple table and get started entering data, click here. If you want to learn more about the details of constructing a table from scratch, click here."

The former lesson will just briefly go over the basics of fields and data types. The latter will go into all the nitty-gritty of field sizes, validation rules, etc. There will essentially be a road map you can follow. You can get a quick overview of each topic, or "dig deeper" into a specific one. 

I realize that a lot of people want to just "get to it" when it comes to databases. They want a brief overview of tables and queries, but maybe they want to spend a lot more time on form design and relationships. This would give them that option.

Right now, my lessons are taught in the order that I believe it's best to learn things, but even my idea of "what" to cover "when" has changed over the years. I probably should get to relationships earlier in the series, and not wait quite so long to introduce some basic VBA. But some users might want to spend a lot of time learning everything there is to know about query formulas.

Obviously this will take me a LOT of time to set up. The web site is pretty much already configured to handle these kinds of lessons with the new way I present things. I can easily put links below each video to take you in different directions. It's the time it will take to map everything out and record new videos.

What do you think? Obviously, this concept will be MOST useful to NEW users who are just getting started with Access, but as people who have taken a lot of my courses, I value your input.