Which Is Right For You? Full Course or Seminar?

I get a lot of emails from people asking me, in a nutshell, whether they should take my full Access course, or a specific seminar on a topic. Well, that answer depends on you, your goals, and your current level of knowledge of Access. 

If you already have a well-rounded education with Access and you have been working with it for a while, then feel free to dive right into any seminar that you think covers a topic you're interested in. However, if you're just getting started, or you aren't sure if you're going to know enough to implement the seminar material, then I generally recommend my full Access course to give you a well-rounded education first, then get into the more specific topics of a seminar.

Seminars are generally not designed for beginner Access users, and assume you have a base-level working knowledge of Access development already. Some of the more in-depth seminars, like my Security Seminar, require you to already have a pretty solid foundation of Access. Most of them will list a "pre-requisite" course. If that's the case, check out that course's outline to make sure you know all of the material.

Most of the seminars came about because my students were interested in learning more about a specific topic. It was too much to cover in the regular course because it's not something that's suitable for everyone. For example... I cover a little bit of working with images in my regular course, but for people who want to learn more, there's the Imaging Seminar. Not every student wants to learn how to work with images. 

I cover a little bit of calculating loan amortizations, and securing your database, and SQL in my regular courses, and some students want to learn more about these things, but not every student does. So that's what the seminars are. They dive deeper into specific topics or develop specific projects. I try to keep the full course to topics that have a mass appeal. 

So my recommendation is - if you're not sure - follow the regular course. Get the solid foundation and a broad overview (breadth-first) approach to Access there. If you want to dive deeper into any specific topic (depth-first) then check out the related seminar.