Access-ing Learning

Sometimes you end up learning something that you thought was entirely silly or old!

Life can be funny sometimes. I remember about 1.5 or 2 years ago, I came across something that I thought was very strange. I was on my company's Office365 site looking to get some software that I needed for one reason or another. Looking through the catalog, I came upon something that I thought was weird. "Access" and I'm like ...okay so that's probably something Active Directory related, right? NOPE LOL turns out it's a fucking database app? What the hell is that?

I did a little bit of learning about it, because once I figured out Access was a database type thing, I was like "oh it's probably like SQL". Well, no, not really. It's structured.. yes but it's also very different.

About a month and a half ago, one of the things in the new role that I'm diving head first into was doing some stuff for folks that my former colleague used to do. It was important work, compiling datasets and stuff and transforming it into something more meaningful. I had asked him to do it for me once or twice and it took a little bit, but the end-result was there so it was cool. Fast forward a few years and the restructuring happened.. guess who was now responsible for compiling that data?! ME! :D

I didn't have a fucking clue what was going on, and had other higher priority things on my plate.. so I kind of pushed it off, but knew in the back of my mind that it needed to get worked on. Two weeks ago I knew that there were things coming up that needed this work to be done, so I started getting into it. One of the things that's funny is how we all have different styles for things. One of them being organizational skills... seeing this dudes old files made me flinch! LOL

I finally got past the atrocious organizational hierarchy of the files and got into the nitty gritty. A real challenge in the world today is that people keep knowledge and processes close to their chest so that they can have some sense of job security or something. That's probably what the intent was and unfortunately.. his job was not secure yet we are up a creek without a working paddle. The paddle is there.. it just doesn't work very well!

So in between tasks, stressed out as hell about it, I was piecing together the whole thing. I was missing one critical component though, and thankfully a colleague of mine ended up having it because she was in some random meeting a long time ago and was sent it. SHIT that was the most important part LOL

I'm pretty stoked in that I've had a recent breakthrough with the damn process. Thankfully I've got a pretty good analytical skillset and I can break things down after a little while. Initially it's stressful because it's like trying to grab at the wind.. but eventually you snatch up a leaf here and one there and pretty soon you've got a handful of leaves instead of just a fistful of nothing.

I think one of the fun things about this is getting a refresher on something that many people think is old as fuck and archaic. Who uses Access for database stuff anymore? Certainly not a lot of places! It's cool though for me because it's one more tool to stick in my toolbelt.. I have plans of combining some of it with my Excel skills like Power Query and hopefully we can come up with a process that is at least a few LESS steps than what we are doing now, but one step at a time!

What about you, have you found new skills for old technology? Let me know in the comments!