Greetings all. I've been asked by the engineering department at my
place of work to redesign a database used to store information about
schematics drawn over the past 60 years. I've created a table of
approximately 17,700 records, including stored file paths to the
scanned versions of the drawings here on our network.

What I'm trying to duplicate is this. <a href="http://photobucket.com"
target="_blank"><img
src="http://i16.photobucket.com/albums/b17/bamabmw/Michelin/workflowsnapshot.jpg"
border="0" alt="Automanager Workflow">[screen shot]</a>

The reason we're moving this to Access is because the program we're
currently using is just all kinds of slow, approximately 4 to 5 minutes
per search.

The search functionality of AMW (our current software) checks every
stored field for whatever keyword(s) you give it. I'm in way over my
head here and I'm the closest thing to a programmer we have. Also, it's
been a while since my Access class back in college.

Any insight to replicating that user interface, including ideas for
implementing a drawing preview, would be greatly appreciated. Heck,
I'll take you out for ribs and steak! :P Thankyou for any ideas, or
direction you can give me to get this project off the ground. I've
checked several tutorials but they all just talk about the basics, and
I can understand those, but I these more complex functions befuddle me.
Thanks all!