Access 2013 Essentials

Why should you choose Access instead of Excel? Discuss the interface features shared by all of the applications in the Office 2013 Suite and the ways that Access differs. Explore a couple of interface features that you'll want to be familiar with and especially the strange behavior of the Save command in Access as compared to the other apps in Office 2013.

Work with the most basic element of an Access 2013 database, the table. Discuss the different document views available in Access 2013 and learn about the database objects known as forms.

Discuss the query, a tool for programmatically accessing and manipulating the data in the database, and reports. Explore the idea of a relationship between tables in a relational database.

Learn about data and data types in Access, and about simple data entry into an Access table.

Explore navigating the data sheet view of a data table, and go further into sorting and filtering in the Datasheet View by discussing the totals feature. Explore the Design view for tables inside of an Access 2013 database.

Learn about the unique identifier that is generally assigned to every record in a database, the primary key. Work on creating, editing, and deleting relationships between tables in a database. Discuss referential integrity which refers to the set of link settings that ensures you don't damage or make inconsistent changes to the database by making changes to related tables.

Discuss data validation and input masks, two ways of ensuring that the data inside of your database is consistent and conforms to specific forms that you provide. Learn about Access's Lookup feature, which can be seen in the Datasheet View of a data table.

Learn how to create a simple query by creating one, and how to use grouping and expressions in calculations to perform some basic summary and analysis on data.

Learn how to use functions and expressions, and how to use the SQL join query to join tables.

Learn how to work with action queries (queries that make changes to a database rather than just selecting records) and about summary queries with cross tab and totals queries. Discuss SQL, the programming language that underlies the graphical tools that Access provides.

Disucss forms as the graphical interface to Access programs, and working with forms in the layout view.

Move from the Layout View into the Design View, and learn how to work with controls.

Discuss the topics of searching, sorting and filtering and how to do so in a form context rather than working with the data sheet. Learn how to step up the complexity of form building using controls, and about sub-forms and how they can map information from the surrounding form onto the sub-form.

Learn how to create reports from database objects, use expressions as reports are built, and group and sort in Reports.

Explore laying out a report for the page and the screen using the layout view, and working with the Design View for editing and creating reports.

Introduction to macros, which are simple programs that run within databases. Explore the steps to import data into an Access database.