Access Templates

One of the reason Microsoft Office applications (i.e. Word, Excel, Outlook, etcetera) are so great is because they have such a large support community. There are volunteers who offer support on the forums and you also have Microsoft website support via tutorials, how to's and also templates.
For the most part templates are a great place to start when working on a project. They offer a frame to build on, alter and fit to your personal need. Most Office application templates are easy to alter and fit to your need. I want to focus on Access templates.
Most people in the office world are familiar with MS Office templates. Where Word, Excel, PowerPoint templates are basically 'fill in the blank' type templates MS Access Templates are not. Not only are they not 'fill in the blank' style templates they are in many ways 'inflexable.' You can bend and cut and paste your way through most Office templates but you can't do the same with Access (unless you want an application that does little to nothing.) But the idea of a template is to have a frame to work with, isn't it? I really don't think that's the case with those in Access. These templates work great as long your need very closely resembles the original purpose of the template.
What am I saying? When you go to the Microsoft template site to pick a, say, Word template you can take that template and alter many parts of it to fit your need and never hurt the document as a whole. The document will work just as it did when you loaded it for the first time. If you pick a PowerPoint template, you can cut, paste, delete and move slides around all you want and you will still be able to run the presentation. But, when you get an Access template you have to be very careful what you create, delete, copy or paste because so many pieces of the template relate to so many other pieces. This is the the beauty of Access and catch. To keep everything in line Access has to keep every part working together.
One of these things Access keeps in line are table relationships. Table relationships are the way Access understands how your information works together. This is what allows you to have 'Contacts' with 'Visits' and 'Visits' with 'Notes.' This is what allows you to click a button and have a form open exactly for the related 'Customer.' And keeping things in line goes beyond table relationships.
There's also 'Automation.' Automation is what allows Access to do the mundane repetitive tasks without interference or help from the user. It's what calls the correct form with the correct related data so the user can make alteration easy and quick. Else, the user ends up having to search from form to form, table to table to find the right records. I'm using some very basic examples here and for good reason. Good Access databases (which Access templates are) have lots of complex automation. Moving data between listboxes, having cascading relationships with your combo boxes on forms, Checking the validity of what a user has entered to make sure it matches the businesses rules of doing business, all of these occur in different Access applications with different degrees of complexity.
So with all that said, what are Access templates good for? Well, they're good for many things. First, they're great if your business need matches the intended original purpose of the template. If you have a need for contact management, the 'Contact Management' template is a great place to start. If you have a need for keeping track of inventory then the 'Inventory Management' template is good for that. There are many templates designed for the most common business needs. So if you need matches one of the templates then go for it! Second, they are a great place to learn. Templates offer a great source of 'how to' examples for your own personal use. Do you want to know how to set up a 'Master Detail' situation? Templates are a great place to start. How do code behind events work? Open the templates and start digging behind the code. Is database design something you are learning? Open the templates and look at the table structure and the relationships. Looking for great examples on form design? Open the forms and tear them appart (you can always re-download the template if anything goes wrong.) Third, they are a great place to spark your own ideas. You can look at how the template does a thing and implement it in your own application. If you like the way a form is layed out, you can mimick it (without totally copying it, that's stealing.) There are a lot of great uses for the Access templates and I'm sure others could add much more.
The point I'm trying to make is this. Access templates are much different from most of the familiar Office templates and you have to look at them in a different light than that of the others to get the full value out of them.