Beginner Skills in Microsoft Access

Do you feel that Access if difficult to tame? You need to create a new database but find if difficult to even start your project. This is totally normal.

This 2 day course is designed for users that have little or no familiarity with Access. The focus is on creating tables, setting relationships between tables, creating powerful queries and reports. Instead of listening to hours of lecturing we spend most time playing with Access. In this course we examine and decipher over 6 different databases.

At the end of this workshop, the participants leave with over 8 databases samples to explore and practice with. We also answer design questions and warnings about what not to do.

Detail

• Short tour of Access.
• Understanding what is a database and its various components: Tables, Relationships, Queries, Forms and Reports.
• How everything in interrelated.
• We examine a flawed database and learn to identify the problems. We then fix the most important difficulty by splitting the tables and setting a relationship.
• Select queries. We understand everything there is to know about the query window. Learn how to use criteria and sorting.
• Using expressions in queries. Creating formulas and understanding concatenation.
• Summary queries. We learn to group records together while counting, summing, averaging fields withing each group. This allows to answers such as ‘How many different products each customers purchased last year?’ or again ‘What is the total hours spent by each employees for each projects per months?’
• About Access reports. Reports serve many needs. With the Access report generator one can create an infinite variety of reports. Discussion about data source for a report (table vs. query).
• Simple list report. Reports that prints data on each page without any Grouping. Adding a Grand Total on the last page.
• Preparing data for report that uses various grouping levels. This feature allows to have subtotal for each group. For instance printing staff activities for each states with a subtotal and/or count for each state. In general there will also be a grand total at the bottom.

Note

To benefit fully from this 2 day course it would be beneficial for each participant to have used a database int the past and possibly have created a couple of simple queries. It is recommended to bring a memory stick to make a personal copy all the files.