After browsing this site for a couple of years, I made an account to reply to your comment and say, "This is exactly right" lol. I'm a teacher who uses Excel for basic stuff (power query, pivot tables), but I'm also using Excel as a "database", which is obviously not a good idea.

So here I am trying to take the next step and learn SQL along with good database design, but learning these things through Postgres is really not appropriate for someone like me. I think I have to swallow my pride and start with Access or something.

You may want to try https://dbeaver.io/ + SQLLight for the start.

You just download binary for your OS, create a db as described here (https://www.sqlite.org/quickstart.html) and then connect to it with dbeaver.

This is more the enough to get familiar with SQL.

No shame in using Access! It's actually part of how I got my start in tech. Started with an Access database, started writing macros for it in VBA, then started writing VB.NET, then convinced a higher up to give me access to a SQL Server database.

I was in an industry with an absurd number of boilerplate forms that needed to be printed and the ability to create Access forms that automated all the manual filling out coworkers were doing felt like magic. Postgres doesn't really have an equivalent of that.