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. You'll start by opening the application and creating a new database.

It's time to lay down the law! In this lesson, 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. You'll also set up rules that only allow 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.

In this lesson, you'll create additional tables for the class database, customize 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.

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 allows you to select one or more tables' fields to include. You'll also determine the form layout.

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.

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, and then you'll get to create a query on your own!

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.

In this lesson, you will learn to plan, build, and use queries that pull data from multiple tables simultaneously. This gives you more power over your data and allows you to build the foundation for truly customized reports.

Reports are easy to create and customize. In this lesson, you will build a simple report using the Report Wizard. Then you will change the report's appearance, using layout view and design view. These skills are foundational to creating and designing reports for any data in your database.

In this lesson, you will 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.

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.

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.