Introduction to Access

Access

Microsoft Access is a powerful program to create and manage your databases. It has many built in features to assist you in constructing and viewing your information. Access is much more involved and is a more genuine database application than other programs such as Microsoft Works.

Microsoft Access can be used for personal information management (PIM), in a small business to organize and manage all data, or in an enterprise to communicate with server.

Microsoft Access stores information in what is called a database. For now it is good enough to know that your data is put into a database and not worry about the details. We will be explaining databases and other key Access elements in a later lesson.

There are four major steps to using Microsoft Access:

1. Database Creation: Create your Microsoft Access database and specify what kind of data you will be storing. A retail business might create a database to store all their sales information (i.e. items sold, customer, employee, commission, etc)

2. Data Input: After your database is created the data the store gathers every business day can be entered into the Access database.

3. Query: This is a fancy term to basically describe the process of retrieving information from the database.

Report (optional): Information from the database is organized in a nice presentation that can be printed in an Access Report

Database File

This is your main file that encompasses the entire database and that is saved to your hard-drive or floppy disk.

Example) StudentDatabase.mdb

Table

A table is a collection of data about a specific topic. There can be multiple tables in a database.

Example #1) Students

Example #2) Teachers

Field

Fields are the different categories within a Table. Tables usually contain multiple fields.

Example #1) Student LastName

Example #2) Student FirstName

Datatypes

Datatypes are the properties of each field. A field only has 1 datatype.

FieldName) Student LastName

Datatype) Text