Kim, I find that the Access query designer is a great tool and I tend to use it in preference to SQL but there are some queries, e.g. the Union query mentioned by homeless and myself that you cann't produce with it, there are occasions where you may find you wish to "tweak" what Access has produced and there are certainly occasions where I find it useful to see what Access has produced - sometimes seeing the text (which would probably make some degree of sense to you even now) can make the reason for a problem clear...

SQL is an industry standard. Understanding it will take you a lot further than just Access, you would be equipped to write queries in Oracle, MS SQLServer, MySQL, etc.

Jon