I am a self-taught Access programmer wannabe, and so far have been able to cobble together anything anyone has wanted, for later-the-same-day answers to questions and crisis managment. (For a couple of months, I processed all the time for ~6K hourlies when the proper interface broke down, for example.)
But I want to get beyond the “hack-and-slash” work that I’ve been doing. I want to produce databases that I can be proud of, rather than spaghetti that even *I* can’t understand a few weeks later.
Does anyone have a list of cardinal rules I should consider as I build these databases? I am thinking of “The 10 Commandments for Access”, for instance. The critical issue, though, is that I usually am supposed to deliver the finished work within a couple of hours or days of the request: I have to be done before I could even fill out the paperwork requesting a full “business benefits and impacts” study, much less the six months of committee work and VP sponsorship! Any ideas?
Wanting to become a REAL programmer,
-Tim