Drifting Jeri, but every Access book I have read (not your dummy one -I've not seen it) has been crap. They all seem to give loads of screen shots, tell you what you can learn from following wizards (assuming you have 1/2 a brain - and I know you have rather more than that!) in great detail, may give ideas how to attach code to events, but omit the most important bit - or if you are lucky put it in at the end...

That important bit is how to work out what tables you need. Normalisation is one approach but I just go for Entity-Relationships, e.g this place has threads and posts. Having seen this place work, you know each thread has a threadID and a subject. Each post has a postID, a subject(again) and a message. The hidden bit in my simplified (forgetting poster) example is the relationship between thread and post. The answer there is each post has a field you never see - the ID of the thread to which the post belongs and that is the relationship...

I'm no expert by any means and will openly admit to asking others like Dave for advice at folkinfo but, unless the basic principles are understood, you can work through some books, come up with something looking pretty, but pretty useless.

Jon