Menus Macros and Startup options!

This week we'll pick up an activity that'll show us how to create our applicatoin interface (a switchboard) in Access. It'll take a bit of time as we'll need to create some Macros to get our switchboard working well. Last but not least, we'll see how we can get our interface to load when the database first opens!

If we have time we'll also be finding out ...what is SQL? Do I really need to know SQL? There's a great introduction on SQL at Access Tips (as well as lots of other great tips for Access):

Anyone who has built anything but the most basic of queries using the Access query design window has already been using SQL without knowing it. Criteria like: Between #01/01/2003# AND #01/07/2003# or Not("London") or In("London", "Paris", "NewYork") are all phrases from the SQL language.

Access contains many tools and wizards that hep the user create a powerful database without having to learn SQL. But if you are at all serious about database building (and the fact that you are reading this suggests that you are!) a knowledge of SQL will help you build better, more powerful databases. So my answer is an emphatic "YES!".

This week we want to answer just three things:

• What is SQL (not just what it stands for, but what does it do)
• What's in it for me? (ie. What benefits are there to learning SQL?)
• What's an easy way that I can learn SQL?
  

and then, using the simplest Access query in your database (any database), see if you can find the SQL for your query.

Reports and Macros in Access

This week we're going to start by investigating Microsoft's Roadmap to Access 2003 Training. Here you'll see a whole bunch of tutorials about different features of Access (a great place to start if you ever get stuck with your assignment!)

You might spot a tutorial called "Reports: Show off your data" - this is the activity we'll focus on first up! If you've done Cert II and feel confident creating basic reports you'll breeze through the first two sections. The new stuff will be seeing how we can customise reports with calculated fields as well as grouping data in our reports. We'll follow this up with a few exercises from our text.

If you finish really quickly, take a minute or two to Go online for more assistance with Microsoft Office Products (this is a short tutorial about how you can find help for Microsoft products on the Microsoft site).

After morning tea, we'll learn about MS Access's version of Macros to do custom tasks!

Just in case you missed last weeks activities on more advanced queries like Parameter Queries, you might want to check out Using Parameters with Queries and Reports from Microsoft, as well as Calculating Totals with Access Queries.