The first time I ever got my hands on MS Access was a demo cd that came in a magazine in 1996. At that time, I had done very little programming or coding of any kind and had never used a database and even barely used spreadsheets.

I was using the spreadsheet in MS Works to build an inventory list of books for someone and this demo cd for office '97 showed up and I installed it to see what the big deal was. Word wasn't much different that the version included w/ Works at the time. Excel didn't seem any better than what was in Works for what I was doing without a heavy learning curve, but Access, WOW!

Using the onboard help and looking at Northwind, I was able to figure the basics out fairly easily, enough to work within the datasheet and move into forms. Unfortunately, by the time I got that far, the free trial ran out and the cost to purchase office, or even Access alone was prohibitive for my part-time $8.10/hour income.

It was the next year before I started learning HTML and JavaScript and got into web development and a few more years before I started learning server side coding and databases and finally, around 2013 or so, I was able to get my first Office 365 subscription that included Access and slowly started learning it again. Bought a couple books (Access 2013 Inside Out, good book, but disappointed me somewhat with the format, and later Access 2016 Bible).

Then, once I found this site, learning became much faster and easier!