🚀 go-pugleaf

Before you take any responses as volunteers for e-mail mentoring, be sure to
read what thee FAQ at http://www.mvps.org/access/netiquette.htm has to say
on that subject. The newsgroup is the best mentor that you can find... you
expose your questions to people of varying levels of experience all around
the world. Many questions are answered in minutes after someone sees them,
though it may take the questions and answers longer to make their way
through the Internet to the plethora of news servers.

In regard to #1: It is impossible to say, since we don't know what your
capabilities are, where you are in the process, nor, indeed, what you mean
by "really able to do some serious work". I define "basic developer
competence" as the ability to take a well-crafted set of specifications
(done by someone else) and design and implement a workmanlike Access
application with a usable user interface. It takes a varying amount of time
and effort for different people to reach that point. And, of course, there
could be varying definitions of "workmanlike Access application".

For example:

When I craft what I consider a workmanlike Access application, it will have
at most one macro (AutoKeys, because there's no realistic substitute, if
needed). The reason is that I include error handling and you can't do that
with macros.

On the other hand, a colleague (who is an engineer, not a programmer or
database developer) created for his employer, a large urban school district,
an application used for at least 7 years by the school district's food
service operation (many cafeterias feeding thousands of children each day),
with which they are happy, that has, he says, "not one line of code not
generated by the Wizard". It's hard to argue with success -- the inability
to field and handle errors just hasn't seemed to be a problem there.

And #2, if you'll post the specific questions with sufficient detail and
background, you can get some good answers.

A final word, one of the easiest ways to draw flamers is to say "No flamers
please..." but not have read the newsgroup's FAQ, which in
comp.databases.ms-access is posted daily with a link to the FAQ site which
is chock-full of great technical information as well as a discussion of
netiquette.

"Lonnie" wrote

> I am teaching myself ACCESS and have some basic questions.
> 1.  How long should it take before I'm really able to do some serious work
> in ACCESS?
> 2.  other questions.
> No flamers please............