My first Micrsoft Access problem was linking. I remember back in about 1994 when I was an Informix DBA and programmer. Our company purchased some data-mining software to monitor our production data. As part of this project, the software company had to produce an Access 2 database to manage the production data. The first version of the database came out, and our company tested it and made comments.

The second version of the software was delivered, and we hired a data entry temp to punch thousands of lines of data into it. Naturally, the instant real data had to be added to the database and issues arose, we contacted the developer. He came back with these comments: "You will have to stop the data entry, put the database on a floppy disk, send it to me by courier, and I will send it back when I've made the changes (in two days)."

This process was not ideal from our company's point of view, so I started to read the help manual (yes, there was one in those days), and there on page 13 was a section that detailed the importance of splitting the database. We informed the developer (who, we found out, was new to Access), and he promptly split the database and our data entry temp got back to work. So too did the developer!

If there is a managers takeaway to this story, it is that  it helps if you can look your developer in the eye and give him well researched advice like I did with the Database Splitting wizard.