Merry Xmas! It's a Retro Access Seminar From 2002

I've got an early Xmas present for everyone. I was going through some old boxes of CDs in my garage and found a Microsoft Access seminar I recorded years ago. This was the first seminar I ever put online, way back in 2002, long before YouTube existed. I advertised it to my local customers in Buffalo, New York, and I had about four or five people sign up. At the time, I was thrilled to have that many attendees.

The seminar was broadcast live online using Windows Media Encoder, which meant people had to connect directly to my computer. This was 20 years ago, so there was no Zoom or any of the tools we have today. No live streams on YouTube. I was pretty proud of myself for pulling it off back then.

If you'd like to see how I got my humble start, this is it. The first real seminar I recorded and made available for people to watch. The entire session is about 10 hours long and unedited, so there may be some dead spots, like a couple of minutes of silence at the beginning. Just skip ahead when needed. It gets started for real at about time index 12:30.

Most of the material is still relevant today, and a lot of it overlaps with what I cover in my Expert and Developer level classes. Yes, there’s even some VBA. If you can get past the small screen size and the poor audio quality, it’s a pretty good seminar, at least the parts I watched. I haven’t rewatched the whole thing, but the content is solid. Back then I was nowhere near as fun and crazy as I am today, but it's still a good watch.

So, without further ado, here it is. Let me know what you think.

Merry Xmas. :)

- Richard

Bonus!

•  Handbooks & Database File

I almost forgot... I found the original handbooks from this seminar too. The first one goes way back to 1998 when I used to teach this in my actual computer center classroom!