There are some drawbacks with Access: like most MS-stuff, it tends to be
pretty user-friendly, which means it takes some of the power out of what you
can do with it; largely there are compatibility issues, sometimes between
various versions of Access itself, or between Access & other applications
(GIS, or spreadsheets, for example) that you might want to think about.
There are also limits on how many relations you can store (something around
500,000, as I remember, which sounds like a lot until you hit that limit and
then scramble a way to export your data into some new DB). Similarly, one of
the projects  I might soon be working on will deal with the problem that an
old Filemaker system will have to be overhauled & mounted on something much
more robust. I don't know what the limits are on Open Office's "Base" but it
does have the advantage of being "open," meaning people can write code for
you, relatively easily, if you need to make changes.
Whatever you do, though, it's always best to really plan out your design:
look what you need, what you might eventually want your DB to do, and then
figure that in a year or two you will want to do a whole lot more so it will
have to be flexible. Get a decent book ("Designing Relational Database
Systems" by Rebecca Riordan is a good start).

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From a purely data management point of view, I have thoroughly enjoyed
developing databases using Filemaker Pro and MS Access.

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