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
 
 
 
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