Access is the database component of Microsoft Office. It is much less familiar to people than other components in part because it is not included with the Home or even Business editions of Office. It is first offered in the Professional edition or it can be purchased separately. Because some students with their own computer do not have the Professional edition installed, they will be needing to use the school computers and may not be able to complete any leftover work at home.
Database does not lack for definitions. The collection below gives a reasonable overview of the term:
A collection of (usually) organized information in a regular structure, usually but not necessarily in a machine-readable format accessible by a computer; A software program for storing, retrieving and manipulating a database -- en.wiktionary.org/wiki/database
Integrated data files organized and stored electronically in a uniform file structure that allows data elements to be manipulated, correlated, or extracted to satisfy diverse analytical and reporting needs -- osulibrary.oregonstate.edu/archives/handbook/definitions/
A collection of information (data) which is arranged in individual records and is searchable. An example of a database is a city phone book; a record includes a person's name, address and phone number. These records are searchable by the last name in each record -- www.library.okstate.edu/infolit/glossary.htm
We make our first mini database with Excel. It was a collection of names and addresses of politicians that we used to mailmerge the company newsletters with. Relational databases like Access are arranged as sets of records (rows in the spreadshseet) containing values called fields (indicated by column headers in the spreadsheet) for a potentially large number of entries. In addition to storing the data, the database usually provides methods of entering the data accurately and efficiently and analyzing the data through queries and reports. You'll try your hand at each of input, storage, and output in this section of the course.