Database Project

I've learned to work a database!  I just completed a project using the powerful and popular microsoft office database tool access.  My assignment included importing a delimited text file that included about a thousand entries with a local gym's customer information.  After importing the raw data I was then asked to perform a query that would show only individual memberships rather than family memberships and only those that have left the gym within the last 6 months.  I found this task to be the most challenging throughout the project, especially trying to only display the customers that had terminated their membership within the last 6 months.  I did a search and found an expression that worked and displayed only the requested memberships.  The expression was >Date()-180.  This expression took today's date, March 27th, and subtracted 180 days or 6 months.  By putting a greater than sign in front of the expression it only displays dates greater than 6 months ago.  After doing the query I also did a form to enter in new customer's info as well as do a report based on the aformentioned query.  I learned a lot of features that are available to users through microsoft access but I'm sure I've only began to scratch the surface to the sofware's database capabilities.

I think there would be several ways to take better advantage of the database used in this assignment.  I think it would be a good idea to do a query on just family memberships and compare the difference between how many family customers you've lost to how many individual members you've lost.  This will help to tell you what marketing strategies would be best suited to retain more of your customers.  I think it would also be helpful to do a report on what the average length of a gym membership is for a family and individual.  In my opinion, these would be vital statistics when forecasting sales for your business as well as marketing to retain current customers. 

Overall, I thought this was a great and challenging project.  I enjoyed learning some of the more important features of access and am looking forward to taking advantage of the power of databases in the near future!