Are you hell-bent on 'learning' Access for him? I needed to construct a simple db for Mrs B that she could search for given parameters and gave up trying to use Access. I finished up with a very workable Excel sheet with VBA that does what we need and will also run in Open Office. There are also a few other 'free' alternative db solutions for Windows if you Gargle. Eg Mozilla do one (Firebird) - but I have no knowledge of it.