Database tools such as Microsoft Access are excellently suited to storing and working with complex data, especially if it has many relationships. For example, if you want to make a list of the members in your club, then of course a spreadsheet will work—unless you also want to make a list of club events, associate members with events, and be able to quickly see which events are run by which members or which events a particular member participated in. A database could also be used to find which members haven’t met a minimum level of participation, or which members have been so helpful that they deserve extra recognition.

Databases provide a similar set of benefits if you want to manage a collection of CDs. Of course you could store the list in a spreadsheet, but what if you want to be able to easily store ratings for songs and make a list of all of the bands whose music you like or whose CDs you’ve purchased in the past year? Again, a database will fit the ticket nicely.

On first blush a database will seem to be just like a spreadsheet; when you create your first database in the next section it will look suspiciously like an Excel worksheet. However, databases have one key additional feature: you can create relationships between different tables and perform queries on tables or groups of queries. As a result, a database allows you to represent concrete objects such as a slacking club member or a song. The key, as you will see, resides in the Start Menu .