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Microsoft Access 101
Introduction to Microsoft Access
Create a customer table,
queries, customer form, mailing labels, and more. 99
Minutes. |
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AC101 Major Topics |
- Basic Database Concepts
- Build a Customer Table
- Create a Query to Limit
Data
- Design an Interactive
Form
- Generate Mailing Label
Reports
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If you want to learn how to build
databases with Microsoft Access, you've come to the right place.
Our instructor, Richard Rost, is one of the most knowledgeable Access
developers you'll find. When he's not teaching Access, he's building databases for our clients
worldwide.
Access is one of the most
powerful tools available today for building databases of all sizes.
It can be used for personal databases, running an entire small
business, or even managing data on an enterprise level using
a back-end such as SQL Server. Access can do it all.
We'll begin our course by covering all of the
basic database terminology. We'll talk about the different
components of a database: tables, queries, forms, reports, macros,
modules, and so on. We'll spend some time teaching you how to plan
your database on paper before starting to build it on the computer. This
step is very important for proper database design.
We'll get started by building a database from
scratch. We avoid using a lot of the wizards - we want to teach you
how to build databases, not just have databases built for
you with some wizard. We'll show you how to create your database file.
We'll show you the different parts of Access and walk you through the
interface briefly.
Our goal is to build a small business database
to track customers, contacts, orders, products, and so on.
Eventually this database will be a full-fledged contact manager.
We'll add more to it in future Access courses. In today's class we will
begin by creating the customer table. We'll talk about what
tables are and how they work. We'll talk about the different
fields you'd use in your customer table.
We'll talk about different data types
(text, number, memo, etc.) We'll tell you why certain fields that are
really numbers should be stored as text data types (like ZIP
code). We'll learn about AutoNumbers and Primary Keys.
We'll teach you how to save your tables with the right table
name.
Next we'll add some sample data to our new
customer table. We'll show you all of the right ways to enter
data such as dates, notes, and so on.
When we're all done with tables
we'll move on to building a customer Query. We'll show you how to
construct Queries to limit your data based on certain
criteria (such as, "show me a list of customers sorted by last name
who are from New York.")
When we're done with Queries, we'll get into the
fun stuff: building forms. Forms are a great way to build
interactive windows-based databases that are easy for your
end-users to work with.
We'll spend time teaching you how to create
great-looking forms. We'll talk about labels, text boxes, check
boxes, and so on. We'll show you how to format your forms, change the
colors, resize objects, and so on.
Our goal is to teach you the skills
you need to make professional-quality forms!
When we're done building our Customer
form, we'll show you how to create mailing labels for your
customers right in Access. Yes, for this we'll use the Label Wizard, but
it's a good wizard (you don't want to lay labels out by hand).
We'll use the wizard to create
easy-to-use mailing labels that are based right off our table.
Again, if you're really looking to learn
Access, this is the perfect course to start with. We'll cover all
of the fundamentals from concept to completion. We'll show you
how to build tables, store your data, generate queries, construct forms,
and make mailing labels. This course will teach anyone how to build a
database - no prior knowledge of databases is assumed. Even if
you have been using Access for a while, this is still a great
course for learning the fundamentals - and how a database should be
built, properly.
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