1. Microsoft Access Manual 1 By Dhawala Kovuri Elham S.Khorasani Ismail Guneydas

2. Creating a Blank Database 1.Open up Microsoft Access 2.Click on Blank document button 3.On the right panel, Specify the location for saving your database and click on create.

4. Creating Table When creating a blank database, by default a blank table will be created.You can rename this table by simply right-click on the table name and choose rename. For creating a new table, click on the create tab and on the ribbon choose table The left panel is called the navigation bar and shows all the tables that have been created for this database.

6. Modifying Table There are two different views used for modifying tables: 1.Datasheet view: used for inserting data to the table 2.Design view: used for modifying the table structure(fields)

8. Design view Design view is where you can define your table fields and their data types. Before switching to the design view, the table must be given a name. By default an “ID” field is generated for each table. This field is a unique identifier of each record. It is referred to as the Primary Key Field. It is automatically incremented when a new record is added to the table.

10. Primary Key A field, or a collection of fields, in a table is designated as the primary key.  The primary key uniquely identifies a record in the table.  Example: SSN is unique for each person, therefore it can serve as a primary key for the “person” table.  To set a field as a primary key, right click on the field name and choose the primary key option.  To set more that one filed as a primary key, first select all the fields, then right click and choose primary key option.

12. Field properties Each field has some properties that can be changed. Some of these properties are:  Field Name:  Field Type:  Field Size: Specifies the max size of the field. For example “first name” is not usually bigger than 50 characters  Caption: specify the label for the field when used on the form, by default caption is the field name  Default value: a value that automatically entered in this field for new records

13. Example (Client Table) As an example, let’s create a new table to store client’s information and name it “client”. Each client, has these attributes: SSN, firstname, lastname, phone, address, yearsOfFirm SSN is the primary key for this table. Firstname is not usually more than 40 characters, so the field size of firstname is specified as 40.

15. Datasheet view Datasheet view is usually used for inserting/deleting/modifying records in the table. Remember the data that you enter for each field must match the data-type and attributes of the field, for example in the person table, we specified the data type of the phone field as a number, now if I try to insert something like 453- 6025 in phone field, access gives an error. Therefore the data type of the phone field should have text rather than number.

17. Adding/deleting Records For adding a new record after a row, select the entire row, right click and choose new record option. For deleting an existing row, select the entire row, right click and choose delete row option

19. Sort records For sorting records by a specific field, right click on the column and choose “sort” option. For example, sorting the records by their firstname in the person table

21. In-lab Exercise 2 As an exercise create a student table with the following fields:  StudentID :Number, Primary key  Name: text, fieldsize:50  Nationality: text,fieldsize:10  Graduate: Yes/No  Tuition: Currency  Major: text, fieldsize:15 Insert some record to the table and sort the table by “name” field. Submit your file to the blackboard under lab-exercise2 link.