I was looking forward to this weeks assignments as I am not very familiar with Microsoft Access. The lectures were a little dull until I opened access and tried working with data along with them. This made them much easier to understand the processes and hopefully will help me finish my project on time.
After I took the prerequisite computer class for the Online Business Program, I found a way that Access can be used at our funeral home. For the last 30 years, every time someone passed away, we would type (on a typewriter!) The name of the deceased, date of death, file number and method of disposition on a 3 x 5 index card which would be filed alphabetically in a card catalogue. This is ridiculous, not only because of the archaic method of record keeping, but because the information is of very little value. It is only used to make it easier to look up records in our archives by name.
I proposed and designed an access database had more valuable fields such as buyer names and contact information, and contract numbers. Access allowed the user not only to look up decedents by name, but the information could be sorted by any of the information in the record. The database was available to the four funeral directors and the office manager, and since it contained more more info, sometimes we could avoid having to pull the physical record from the archives.
I am met with a lot of resistance when trying to update or change the processes at my job. When demonstrating the new database to my boss, another employee turned my computer off during the demonstration, thinking that a power failure would be a reason not to use it. To demonstrate it's superiority I pulled an shredded a random index card from the old catalog and turned my computer back on. Guess what? My database was still fine, but I still am working on updating our office.
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