Introduction to Microsoft Access 2010

About This Course

Take control over your data! Whether you're a novice or an experienced database user, this course will show you how to harness the full power of Microsoft Access 2010.

In these practical and project-oriented lessons, you'll learn how to use this award-winning MS Office software to create and customize tables. You'll build relationships between your tables to eliminate redundancies and slash data entry time. And you'll discover how to achieve huge reductions in data entry errors by setting default values, creating validation rules, and building input masks.

In addition, you'll find out how to make your database more user-friendly with custom data entry forms, smart lists, and other sophisticated controls. You'll learn how to retrieve exactly what you need from your database with powerful queries and reports, and you'll even start automating routine tasks with labor-saving macros.

By the time you've finished this course, you'll know how to create an effective database for any information you need to store, document, and manage—at home or on the job.

About The Instructor

This course includes a knowledgeable and caring instructor who will guide you through your lessons, facilitate discussions, and answer your questions. The instructor for this course will be Laurie Fuller.

Laurie has been writing about and teaching people to use Microsoft Office for more than 15 years—including personally training thousands of students, writing hundreds of training manuals, and authoring or co-authoring more than 25 introductory and advanced books on subjects including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Access. Her most recent publication on Microsoft Access is Access 2010 for Dummies.

In addition to writing and teaching, Laurie runs her own firm providing training, marketing, graphic design, and web development services to clients throughout the world, with a focus on helping growing companies and non-profit organizations build their brand through effective promotions, outreach, and education. She is also active in several environmental organizations in her area.

Syllabus

A new section of each course starts monthly. If enrolling in a series of two or more courses, please be sure to space the start date for each course at least two months apart.

Week 1

Wednesday - Lesson 01

In this lesson, you’ll find out what Access is and how individuals, businesses, and organizations use it to store information. You’ll begin to build an Access database . . . including all the components that turn a list of records into reports, forms, and queries. We’ll start by opening the application and creating a new database.

Friday - Lesson 02

It’s time to lay down the law! Today you’ll impose rules that automatically fill an Access table field with a preset value or that automatically insert the symbols commonly included in phone numbers. Also, you’ll set up rules that require allow only certain kinds of data in certain fields. With just a few minutes of work, you can make data entry simpler, clearer, and practically error-free.

Week 2

Wednesday - Lesson 03

Today you’ll create additional tables for our class database, customizing them along the way, and then build relationships between them. This all paves the way for later database features, such as reports, queries, and forms that draw from multiple tables in the database.

Friday - Lesson 04

In this lesson, you’ll use forms for data entry and for viewing records in your tables. You’ll meet the Form Wizard, which makes form building fast and easy and which allows you to select one or more tables’ fields to include. You’ll also determine form layout.

Week 3

Wednesday - Lesson 05

In this lesson, you’ll add buttons and controls to forms. You’ll also adjust table relationships to support the creation of multi-table forms . . . which paves the way to creating queries and reports that draw data from more than one table.

Friday - Lesson 06

Using queries to sort, filter, and search your database is one of the most important skills you’ll master in this course. In this lesson, you’ll create queries that search for specific data. You’ll also customize how Access displays that data. You’ll follow instructions step by step, so you gain confidence with the process; then I’ll turn you loose to create a query on your own.

Week 4

Wednesday - Lesson 07

A query that puts specific records in order or finds all the records that have a general piece of information in common is, well, pretty common. Being able to create that kind of query is a great foundation skill, but it won’t help you find a very specific record. Nor will it let you search for records within a span of dates or other numeric values. It also won’t help you exclude certain records, reducing a large pool of data to just those records you need to see. In this lesson, you’ll create queries that give you true power to search your database.

Friday - Lesson 08

In this lesson, you’ll learn to plan, build, and use queries that pull data from more than one table at a time. This gives you more power over your data and allows you to build a great foundation for truly customized reports.

Week 5

Wednesday - Lesson 09

Reports are easy to create and to customize. In this lesson, you’ll build a simple report using the Report Wizard. Then you’ll change the report’s appearance, using layout view and design view. These skills provide the foundation to create and design any report you may need, on any data in your database.

Friday - Lesson 10

In this lesson, you’ll create reports that are based on the results of queries you create to sort and filter your database. Because queries can combine data from multiple tables, filter for specific data, and sort the results, your report reflects just the data that meet the query’s criteria. This makes truly customized reporting possible—and quite simple.

Week 6

Wednesday - Lesson 11

In this lesson, you’ll plan and create a completely customized report, using a specialized query that controls which data the report includes. You’ll add fields that perform calculations on your data. You’ll customize your report’s layout, too, using design view’s many tools for controlling the structure and appearance of your data.

Friday - Lesson 12

Building macros (short programs that perform a series of steps) helps you speed up and create consistency in your more repetitive Access tasks. From opening a form to running a report to building a new record in a table, macros eliminate redundant procedures by turning them into something you can do with one click.

Requirements

Microsoft Access 2010, (software must be installed and fully operational before the course begins); Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, or Windows 8; Internet access, email, the Microsoft Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox Web browser, , and the Adobe Flash and PDF plug-ins (two free and simple downloads you obtain at http://www.adobe.com/downloads by clicking Get Adobe Flash Player and Get Adobe Reader).