A translation project manager has to deal mainly with customer data, supplier data and project data. Creating and maintaining two or more databases – a customer data base, a supplier data base and a project data base – implies switching between different files and requires a constant adjustment between the databases in order to keep the information consistent. Storing the information in a single file – one 'index card', called a database record, per customer also contains the supplier and project data of projects carried out for this customer – makes the database records very big and hard to handle. Modern database software offers the possibility to structure your files in a relational database: one database file can contain different tables that are set in relation to each other.
For managing databases, Microsoft Access provides wizards offering help for various tasks like creating tables, forms, queries etc.