Customer Rating: 
Summary: Lots of issues ...
Comment: I bought this book for the same reason I buy any "For Dummies" book, to decrease my ramp up time on a particular subject. Generally I can blow through one of these books in a few days and move on to more advanced books on that topic. Disappointingly, I was unable to achieve this goal with 'Access 2007 for Dummies'.
First of all this book starts out assuming that you have a database to work with and makes no effort in teaching you how to build a database from the ground up. Continuing on the assumption that you have your own database (filled with data) that you are going to be working with, the author has to stay in a "high level mode" for the rest of the book. Most of the book has vague references and examples that read something like "If you have X type of data in a Y type of structure you may want to try something like Z". Well, I don't have a my own database filled with this type of data, so, I went looking on the publishers web site for example databases to work with. I was happy when I found out there were example databases on the publishers site, but further disappointed to find out that these examples are rarely used. This makes following along by example next to impossible. The few times when these example databases are used they don't entirely match up to the screenshot's in the book . Which brings me to books use of screenshots. Screenshots are generally a good thing when working with a GUI application such Access. However, the screenshots are off little use due to the fact that the screenshots are of the entire application window, rather than being cropped to show you the control in question. So, when the author is referencing a specific control such as a small button you have to hunt and peck your way through the grayscale image trying to find the button that looks depressed.
After all of the fore mentioned pitfalls I still continued through the book. I was really interested in getting to the sections on charting and switchboarding. Once again, I was disappointed. The author claims that Access 2007 has no charting capability and the reader should use Excel or PowerPoint instead. First of all, this is incorrect. Charting is available in Access 2007 via the "Design View" in a report. Secondly, the author gives no instruction on how to create charts in Excel or PowerPoint as he advises the reader to do. The chapter on switchboards is all of 11 pages long (mostly screenshots) and contains next to no information on how to get these set up and working. As a matter of fact I could not get any of the switchboard examples to work properly with the example databases provided by the publisher.
In the end I ended up learning quite a bit about Access. However, most of what I learned was done with online research while trying to stumble through this book. Getting through this book took me about 4 times longer than it should have due to a the above mentioned problems. All and all this ended up being a waste of time for someone who was short on time in the first place.
