Successful businesses use information effectively to support business decisions. Many other businesses struggle using whatever information that can be painfully won from a mass of unhelpful data. Some businesses survive by blind luck, or the experience and intuition of their staff.Modern hardware and software provides database power that was formerly the preserve of large mainframe systems – but with a far friendlier user interface, far superior reporting and presentation abilities, and for a price that is almost unbelievably cheap. Microsoft Access is one of the best of these new database systems, and the only drawback is that it is so easy to use, the inexperienced may produce a bad database design that will not deliver all the benefits that it could.Another common practice is to store data in a spreadsheet (or even a wordprocessed document). Again, this leads to poor design, often to errors, and to a system that is difficult to maintain and use.