As Mark. Access was my first approach of database and I found it powerful at the time. It has some nice features like generating SQL from "query by example". Its form features and capability to print on various format (sheet of labels for example) was nice too.
On the downside, it is proprietary, and each new version was incompatible with the previous one: if you load a base made with Access 97 with Access 2000, you can no longer load it with the older one...
Although I don't do much personal database works (list of addresses, mostly), for such work I would use either Open Office's database tool (not tried yet) or a good old open source database (MySQL, SQLite come to mind as lightweight bases) with a GUI front end, for example, SQuirreL SQL Client, and probably JasperReport as report front end.
Not as integrated as Access and with steeper learning curve, but somehow more flexible.
Now, I am sure we can find some simple good old non-relational database for the simplistic uses I had at the time. :-)
