Access Beginner Tutorial

Access Beginner Tutorial Good day one, an all, and welcome to Microsoft access 2016 module one, as you can see, my name is Dan McCallister and I will be your instructor today in module one. We're going to talk about the parts of a database, the objects that create it, um, how they relate to each other. But I think the first thing we should do is go grab some practice files. So I would recommend put your video on pause, go get the practice files that we'll need for today's class. They're going to arrive in a zipped version and I'm going to drop my note on the desktop. And then we can talk about how to extract our files from the zipped version..

Access Beginner Tutorial

Never tried to work on files inside a zipped folder. Always extract them first. So put your video on pause, go get our practice files, download the zip folder. And when we come back, we'll talk about how to extract them from the zipped folder. So put our video on pause, go get your practice files. All right, welcome back. Um, I'm going to now step out to my desktop, where I have downloaded my practice files and here they are in the zipped version. So I'm going to double click on them to open up the zipped version of this folder. You can see the file name, extension here, dot zip..

And again, I was mentioning a moment ago, never tried to work on files while they are zipped. So the next thing we need to do is extract all those files. So I'm going to click on this button right here to extract my files. And when I do that, you can see that because I placed mine on the desktop, the extracted version is going to be on my desktop as well. So that's what I'm going to recommend that you do with yours now, depending on what browser you're using, when you downloaded yours, they may have gone into the downloads folder. I'm going to recommend that, maybe copy them out to the desktop, and.

Then you can do what I'm about to do, which is extract these files. So again, it's about to extract a folder out onto my desktop, and I'm going to click on this button down here that says. I see a little progress bar go across there. And now I'm out on my desktop. I'm actually going to have two copies of these files, one of them zipped, and one of them extracted, let me show you what that looks like here. So I'm going to close this window again. I'm going to head to my desktop. Maybe I can use my, a alt and tab to get out to my desktop..

And now out on my desktop here is the zipped version and here is the extracted version. I'm going to actually take the zip version and Chuck it in my recycle bin. If something becomes corrupted in the extracted version, then I'll still have the zipped version, but I won't get myself mixed up by opening them from the wrong place. So put your video on pause, do what you just saw me do, extract those so that you can now see this extracted folder. And then I'm going to recommend that you ditch the zip folder, drop it in your recycle bin..

Right? Everybody welcome back. So when you double click on your new folder, this is what I'm hoping you will see access modules one and two, three and four, five and six, seven and eight. We're going to of course, go to access modules one and two. These are the folders that you should see. So the first one that I'm interested in is named north wind. Now, when you extract yours, you may or may not see the file name extensions out here. Don't worry about that. It turns out that's a windows thing, not necessarily an access thing. And the file that I'd like to start with is a, this one.

Named north wind dot ACC DB. So again, take a, take a moment and put our video on pause, extract those files. And then the last thing you want to do right here is open up north wind dot ACC DB. I'm about to double click on that and open it up. Actually, I'm going to go a slightly different way. I'm going to start Microsoft access first, and then I'm going to tell access to open that file. So here's what access looks like when I first started. Got a whole bunch of templates available out here. So these templates, the first place I can remember seeing templates pop up and a start screen and a Microsoft project..

I was in Microsoft publisher several years ago. Um, they would have all these cool templates with things like, uh, greeting cards and calendars and cool stuff like that. Um, and then the next place that I saw templates on start-up was on the Mackintosh side of the office suite. Now, every time you open up a one of the Microsoft access, now, anytime you open up one of the Microsoft office programs, this is the first thing you'll see whether you're in word or access or PowerPoint or any of your favorites, I guess, except outlook outlook doesn't really have templates. So as I scroll up and down here, I can see templates for things that would go.

On the web, by the way, to create a web database of some sort, you have to have a SharePoint server to upload it to, and I don't have that available today. So we will not be discussing the web apps, but the advantage of creating a web app is that your users could use it through their internet Explorer. They wouldn't actually have to have a copy of Microsoft access. So most of the choices in here are pre-created databases. They don't have any data in them, but they would have a couple of tables and a query or two. And right now, any of you who are beginners, that won't really mean much to you..

So I'm not going to start necessarily with one of those. What I would like to start with is one of those practice files that we just downloaded and extracted. So specifically, I'm going to go over here to my open button, and then I'm going to navigate out to my desktop because that's where I started my files. I can do that by browsing down here. And when I click on browse first place, it looks like all good Microsoft and Adobe programs is in the documents folder, the documents library. In this case specifically the, my documents folder, except that's not where I extracted my files to..

I put mine out on the desktop. So that's where I'm going to head. I'm going to go over here and click on desktop. And now I can see my excess 2016 samples. Now, I don't know how many of you are familiar with this favorites area over at the left side, but it can be very handy. Um, for example, I'm sure that most, all of us who work in some kind of corporation have times when we have to navigate to a shared drive, maybe that S drive for the shared stuff or that end drive for network, uh, a shared network folder..

So sometimes you find yourself having to go to that end drive and then into a folder inside the end drive, and then into a sub folder inside the folder on the end drive that lives in the house that Jack belt. What I would like to do is make a little shortcut to my excess 2016 samples folder here. Now, in this case, it's not going to save me a lot. It's only going to save me one click next time. I want to find it. I don't want to have to go to the desktop and then go find the folder over here. So what I'm about to do is grab this access 2016 samples folder and drag it to the left..

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    And I'm going to put it right here in my favorites area. I have to be careful not to drop it inside another folder that would just

    Be recreating the problem of having to go to a folder in a sub folder. So I'm going to look for this little horizontal line between the folders as I drop it over here in my favorites area. And the advantage to that is the next time I have to go to excess 2016 samples. I won't have to go to the desktop first. It'll be sitting right here and I can get to it with a single click. So I'm going to recommend that you take a moment and do that. You're going to go to file in access and open, and then go to your access..

    2016 samples, which was out on in my case, out on the desktop. And then you saw what I did. I grabbed the folder and dragged it over here into the favorites area. So why don't you put the video on pause, take just a moment and do that. And then we'll come back and we'll open a file named north wind. All right, everybody. Welcome back. I'm headed to my access. 2016 samples folder. Right now it's in the mods one and two folder with a double click. And then let's open up this one right here, north wind. Um, you may or may not see the file name, extension dot ACC DB..

    So just double click on north wind when it pops open, it should come up looking like this then because it originally came from a website, it's got the security warning, just making sure that you trust where this came from. And if we do trust where it came from, hopefully we do. Then we can click here on enable content. And then what you're going to see right now is the opening screen called the splash screen, giving you a chance to sign in as someone named Andrew and Cine. So why don't you put our video on pause, go open up that Northwind database..

    And when it opens up, you'll probably see the warning about certain content being disabled. You'll click the enable editing button and your screen should look like mine. So put the video on pause and then come on back and we will do some stuff together. Welcome back one and all congratulations on getting our first database opened an on-screen. So when we left off, we were looking at this log in dialogue window, it's called offering us a chance to sign in as Andrew chin Cine. I would like to turn down that offer to sign in as Andrew and Jeanie so that we can see the basics of the database before we try to start.

    Using it as any one particular user. So here's what I'm going to recommend right here in this dialog window. It's got its own close button. I'm going to recommend that we do that. Please click on that close button. And so now you can see that we have this database open and we can see, uh, the ribbon up here. And we'll talk about the parts of the ribbon for just a moment. And over here at the left side, we have something called as you can see the navigation pane. So I'm at the top of the navigation pane. I see these little double chevrons. And when I hover over them, it says shutter bar open and close button..

    So I'm going to click on that. Um, the little double chevrons here. And when I do that, I can see a little bit more about my database named north wind. Now I know that I'll have a combination of veterans and beginners here looking at our first module. We talked to my veterans for just a moment. You veterans, you're used to seeing the tables in one list and the queries in another list and the reports in another list. And you're not seeing that right now. So for my veterans, in fact, for everybody, let's go up here next to the word Northwind, and we'll click this little, pull down arrow..

    It's called a list arrow. And when I click on it, I see several different ways that I can navigate through the objects of my database. First thing I'd like to do is change it from the name of the database, Northwind traders, to group things by object type, by the way, I'm, I can't click on either of these gray choices here. They're not clickable choices, their names, their titles. So right here is the group called navigate to category. And I would like to navigate by the object type. So when I click on object type, now I can see the tables versus.

    The curries versus the forms. By the way, the reason I'm seeing all of them is also here under the little list arrow. The top says navigate by object type. The bottom part here says I could show myself just the tables or just the queries or just the forums. The other choice down here is I have selected all database objects, all access objects. So I'd like you to put our video on pause and do that for just a moment. We had the splash screen that we closed so that we weren't signing in as androgen Cine. We had the expander double chevrons over here..

    And then we went to the pull-down list and selected navigate by object type. So take just a moment and do that to begin navigating by the object type, separating the tables from the queries, from the forums, put our video on pause, do that much, and then come on back. And again, we will do some stuff together. So now over at the left-hand side, I can see tables and queries and forms and report. Well, that's great for my veterans to see things that way, but for my beginners, maybe you're wondering to yourself right now. Okay. So what the heck is a table? What's a query. What's a form..

    Yeah. It just so happens. I have a little diagram that I've created, and this is not the last time we're going to see this diagram.

    I'll be using it a lot through our lessons. So the most important part of your database, these guys right here, these tables, the tables are where all of your data is stored. Um, so you really can't have a database without some tables. Uh, next objects that we'll be talking about after the tables are these guys over here, the queries queries, let you ask questions from your tables, by the way..

    Um, I've got some arrows here talking about how data can be transferred between these different objects. So the data will be stored in the tables. When you run a query, it will pull a certain records from the table and then display them on screen. But then if you begin typing information into the query, it will actually feed back into the table. That's what these two arrows are about. So when you run a query, it pulls information from the tables and displays it. And then while the query is open, if you begin doing data entry, you will be feeding the data back into the tables where they are actually.

    Contained a little bit later, not necessarily right now, but in another module we'll be talking about forms. Forms are a little bit more graphic way to pull information from tables and to actually do data entry into tables. So again, this is a two headed arrow here. Data flows both ways, but it's actually stored in the tables in the end. Our fourth object reports, reports are much like forms. In fact, when we do the two modules about forums and reports, you'll see that they're very similar in their, uh, design layouts, but reports are all about putting things on paper..

    And you also might notice that this is a single headed arrow here. There's nothing you can put in a report that will feed back into a table. So reports pull information from tables and then do some special formatting to make your reports do things like add things up running totals, grouping by customer grouping by a product that you sell and so forth. And you might also notice an arrow coming from a query. So if I wanted to remake a report about information from more than one table, Microsoft suggest first make a query that gathers the comp columns,.

    The fields that you want in your report, and then use the query as the record source for the report with the special formatting going on paper. So, man, we got a lot of arrows here, but just in basic things that I want you to notice here, queries can pull in, pull it, push information to and from tables. And the same is true for forms, pull and push information to, and from the tables, we will return to this, this diagram more than once. This is not the last time you'll see this today. I'd like to introduce you to the names of the objects in the interface here..

    I'm going to start at the top of the screen. So it's a little bit muted up here. The colors are a little bit muted, but what I'm looking at at the very top here is called the quick access toolbar. Now, the fact that it has the word access in it does not actually refer to this database program named access. There's a quick access toolbar in word and Excel and PowerPoint. It's just the name that set up for these buttons up here at the top. And again, they're a bit faded out in this particular session, but here is my savior. Here is an undo button. As I hover over them, they'll tell me their names. Here's an ion, did too many called the redo button..

    And then I have a little pull-down list over here that I can add things to my quick access toolbar. And we'll be doctoring up the quick access to a bar a little bit later in our lesson, but known as checkboxes next to the things that are in there. And then another list of about 10 more things that Microsoft knows we might want to put in there. And new to 2013 carried over into 2016, the ability to add a button to go into touch mode. I'm going to go click on that for just a moment. I don't necessarily need you to do it, but I'd like you to see it. When I click on the touch mouse mode, it adds another button up here..

    And then if I click on it, I get a couple of choices. Do I want to turn it on for the mouse or do I want to turn it on for a touch screen? When I click on touch, I'd like you to watch what happens to all these buttons back here, touch, see all the buttons got a bit bigger. Um, this is largely for people who work on tablet, computers, handheld computers with much smaller screens than I'm used to seeing on my desktop. So the ability to have the buttons a little bit bigger is going to make it easier for me to finger touch those things on a relatively small screen. In fact, I've got some friends who work in touch mode all the time, even though they don't even have a touch screen because they like.

    Having the bigger buttons down here. I'm going to go turn that back off. I'm going to go click on that button. I'm going to switch back to mouse mode, which gives me a little bit more working area down here. It makes all my buttons a little bit smaller. So that was called the quick access toolbar. And again, the way I added that touch mode was I clicked on the little pull-down arrow over here. Notice as I hover over it, it says customize my quick access toolbar. And I slid down and I turned on the one for the touch mode. All that did was give me a new button and then to actually turn it to touch mode..

    I had to click on the button and switch it from mouse to touch. So if you'd like to try that. Put our video on pause. Go add yourself a touch slash mouse mode button to your quick access toolbar. And then come on back now to continue with the names of things right below my quick access toolbar. I see the words file home. Create those are called command tabs. And every time I click a command tab, I get a new set of buttons down in this area just below called the ribbon..

    So if I click on the home tab, I get the home ribbon. If I click on the external data tab, I get the external data ribbon. And one of these tabs is not like the others. One of these tabs is not the same. Come on you Sesame street fans. One of these tabs is not okay. Maybe you're not Sesame street fans. The one I'm talking about right here is the file tab. When I go over and click on the file tab, I got this whole new screen comes up. This is called the backstage view. And Microsoft says the backstage view is where you do things to your.

    Files rather than in your files. For example, to open a file or to save a file, to close a file, to compact it, to encrypt it with a password. So this is not ways to add new records to my database, but it is ways to do things with my database, like making copies of it and so forth. And anytime I want to step out of this backstage view, I just click the back button right here and I'm back to my normal view. So again, if you'd like to try that for yourself, put our video on pause, click that file tab, take a peek at the backstage view..

    And then when you're ready you, I click that back button and you'll be back in your normal view with me. Take a moment and do that. So I have the command tabs that produce the different ribbons. The ribbons are broken down into groups of buttons. For example, under my home tab, I have a group of buttons called the views. And then the clipboard group and then the sort and filter group, you could see the group names right down here towards the bottom. Uh, as I go to the database tools ribbon, that is when I click the database tools command tab to produce the database tools ribbon, then I get the tools group, the.

    Macro group, the relationships group. So just the names of things up towards the top of the screen. So we've got the title bar at the top right now. It's slightly off screen. You can't see it right below that. I have the command tabs, which for each produce ribbons with groups of buttons. And then down towards the bottom of the screen, I have this area right now. It just says ready, that's called the status bar. And things will appear down there as we begin doing things. So that's kind of the names of all of the pieces. Let's go look at one of our first objects here we'll tackle. So that's kind of the names of all of the pieces of the interface..

    In a moment we're going to open the first of the objects that is we'll open a table. It's time to explore the in one way, the most important part of our database. And that is the tables. They are the most important because that's where all of our data is stored. So when I click on tables, it expands in this case to show me, man, there's a bunch of tables in this database. Here's the beginning of my queries list down here. So in this particular database, we're keeping track of our sales. We've got customers, we've got employees, we've got inventory, we've got invoices..

    So let's take just to look at our customers here for a moment. I'm going to point at the table name customers and give it a quick double click. And when I do that, it opens up the customer's table over here at the right hand side, Now in a lot of ways, this looks like Microsoft Excel. I have rows and columns of information. I can scroll left and right to see the, uh, the various columns, by the way, another name for columns to a database geek, it's called a field. So you'll notice I don't have a column, a column B column C, I've got an ID column. I've got a company column and to a database geek that would be called the ID field and a company field..

    And what I would call a row in Microsoft Excel, we call a record in database geek terms. So I'm looking here at the customer's table. Notice it has a tab up here at the top instead of the sheet tabs being down here at the bottom, which is where they would be in Excel. Um, so I can scroll left and right by using just arrow keys, I can also use my mouse to go down here to my scroll box and the scroll bar drag it left and right. So in a lot of ways, this looks like Excel, but there are certain things that are different about this compared to Excel..

    For example, if I was in Excel and I hit the enter key, it would jump down to the next row. Here I am an access watch what happens when I hit the enter key here, see how it jumps sideways instead of down. So that's just our first little example of ways that access is different than Excel. And again, looking at the various parts of the interface that we haven't had a chance to talk about yet, because we didn't have a table open until just now I can see some things happening down here just above the status bar. The status bar says that this is the data sheet view, and then right above the.

    Status bar, I can see that I'm looking at records and specifically I'm looking at record number one of 29 total records. Now in Excel, you've probably seen arrows like this to go to the next sheet or the previous sheet in this case. It's not the next sheet. It's the next record. So right now I have highlighted record number one of 29 records. When I click on the right arrow. You'll see. Now it's highlighting record number two and record number three. I have to say it's pretty rare that you're ever going to know, Hey, I need to go to record number seven of this table, but just notice that as you move from.

    Record to record, it does show you that, um, I do have a left arrow with a bar. When I click on that notice, it goes to the very first record. I have a right arrow with a bar. When I click on that, it goes to the very last record. And then just pass that one. There's a little arrow and it's a little bit hard to see. It's supposed to have a little flash on it, called the gleam, and you'll notice as I hover over it, it says new blank record. And when I click on that, sure enough, here I am creating record number 30 right now. Now I'm not actually going to go through with that, but you can see there are some ways that this acts differently than Excel..

    So why don't you take just a moment, put the video on pause and try some of the things you've seen me doing, where I clicked. And then I used arrow keys to move from field to field arrow, keys to move up and down from record to record. I was also playing with the little navigation arrows down here. And if you want to go ahead and click on the button to create a new record, just don't actually go through with creating a new record. So you're just going to take a moment and play with navigating inside this table. So pause the video and get comfortable with that. And then we'll look at a couple other things..

    And I'd also like you to see one other thing about a table right now, we're on, what's referred to as the data sheet view of the table, but somebody had to decide what sort of things we were going to keep track of in our fields. The fact that we want to keep track of the company name, the contact person's last name and first name and email address that's done in something called the design view and all the different objects we're going to look at here in the. A couple of sessions. Um, they each have a user side where the data entry person does things. And there's also the design view. Sometimes I call it the architect side. Let me just show you a quick way to get into the design view..

    I'm going to go to the home tab. And then under the home tab in the home ribbon, there's a nice button over here called the view button. And at first it kind of looks like some old, old style draftsman's tools over here. I'm using some third-party software to zoom in on it like this. You won't be able to do that. You won't be able to zoom in, like I just did it. So I've got the pencil and the triangle and a little ruler here. When I click on that particular button, it takes me to what's called the design view of my table. And so in here I have two parts to it..

    I have a top part, which has the field names. And then I have a bottom part that has the properties to the fields. And we'll be playing with these in a few minutes. But one of the things I'd like you to notice is in my design view for the customer's table, I have a field name, the ID, the company, the last name, the first name, the email address. We saw those just a moment ago only instead of going up and down on my screen, they were going sideways. Well, if I go back to that view button and I click on it here, I am.

    Back in my data sheet view where the field names go sideways across there. So why don't you put our video on pause for just a moment and go up there, click on the home tab and click on the button to go to the design view. Please try that out, everybody. And then come on back and we'll talk about it a little more. So here in the design view, I have several columns here. I've got the field name column, and then you can see for each field name. There's also a data type. Now most of them say short text, but as I use my arrow keys to move up.

    And down through the various fields. Again, most of them are short texts. One of them says long text, as you can imagine, that has to do with how many characters you can type in there. Uh, I also see a hyperlink field down here. Um, in fact, here's one for attachments. If I click on the little list arrow right here, here's a whole bunch of different data types that I can have in my tables. And we'll be talking about these more as we go. And then there's a third column here. It says description, as you can see, it says that's optional. That's a place to write a little note to your data, entry people, to.

    Let them know, Hey, this is what I expect you to be typing in this field. So again, we'll be doing some exploring of that in a few minutes. When we start working with data right now, we're just introducing the objects. And mostly what I want you to walk away with in our introduction to the objects is that there's the user side and there's the design side. So this was the design view of my table. I'm going to go up and click on this button to go back to my data sheet view. So if you haven't already take just a moment to do that, go to the design view, scroll up and down to see all the different field names in the design view..

    Try not to actually change anything in there and then click on this button. Each time you click on, it just takes you back and forth between the design view and the data sheet view. When you're done, come on back here and we'll be looking at the data sheet view of our table. Now over here at the left-hand side in my navigation pane, I do have other tables that are available. Uh, if I click just once on a table, it's selected, but it doesn't open it. If I double click on it does actually open that table. And I've got another one down here for my invoices..

    So I've got tables about my customers. I got tables about my employees. I've got tables about who ordered what on which days, and those are all stored in various tables. Now, maybe I don't want to have all three of them open at the same time. I can right click on one tab here. I'm going to say close that sheet. I'm going to go to this one and right click and say close Atlan in Excel. That would be called a worksheet here in a access. It's called a table and I've got another choice here. Says close, all sounds kind of dangerous, but I'm going to be brave and click on it..

    DISCLAIMER: In this description contains affiliate links, which means that if you click on one of the product links, I'll receive a small commission. This helps support the channel and allows us to continuetomake videos like this. All Content Responsibility lies with the Channel Producer. For Download, see The Author's channel. The content of this Post was transcribed from the Channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XTXv1V3-ag
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