Do you have a collection of things that you like, such as a coin collection, stamp collection, recipe collection, or collection of your favorite music CDs? Do you have an address book with the names, addresses, and phone numbers of your friends, business associates, and family members? If you collect something, chances are you have made an attempt to keep track of and organize the items in your collection. If you have an address book, you have probably wished it were better organized. A computer program like Access can help you organize and keep track of information

For example, assume you have a large collection of music CDs. You could organize your CDs into a database because your CDs are a collection of related items. By organizing your CDs in a database, you would be able to find the CDs by various categories that you define. If the information in your address book were placed in a database, you could produce a list of all your friends and family members who have birthdays in the month of April. Now you can see how useful a database program like Access can be.