Get things done in milliseconds, not minutes.

Slowness in Access is nearly always specific. A form that takes twenty seconds to open, a query that used to be instant, a database that starts the day fine and crawls by 4 pm. Each pattern points somewhere different, which is why I profile before changing anything. The gets-slower-through-the-day pattern usually means file bloat: Access doesn't reclaim space when records are edited or deleted, so a working file can balloon to several times its real size until Compact & Repair squeezes it back down. If nobody has run that in months, the file size alone often explains the complaint.

Query slowness has a shorter list of culprits than people expect. The biggest is missing indexes on the fields used in joins and criteria; a join across tables with a few hundred thousand rows falls off a cliff without them. Close behind are domain functions like DLookup used inside a query, which can execute once per row, thousands of times over. Then there are criteria that force Access to drag an entire linked table across the network before filtering it, and subdatasheets left on "[Auto]", which quietly load child records for every row in a table.

Network setups add their own layer. An un-split database opened by several users over a share is slow by design, because every form, query, and code module travels the wire along with the data. Splitting into a shared back-end and a local front-end per user is often worth more than any single query fix, and it reduces corruption risk at the same time. Where the data itself has genuinely outgrown Access, I'll say so plainly and lay out what a SQL Server back-end changes, rather than tuning something that needs a bigger engine.

There are two checks you can run yourself before calling anyone. Look at the file size in Explorer: if it's hundreds of megabytes for what you know is a modest amount of data, bloat is at least part of the story. Then copy the file to your local desktop and open the copy: if it's dramatically faster there than over the network, the problem is the sharing setup, not the database design. Neither check fixes anything, but both tell you (and me) where to look first.

The results are measured, not asserted. I time the slow operations before touching anything, apply fixes one at a time, and time them again, so you can see exactly which change bought what.