Short Guide Pros to Using MS Access

Field- name, number, or characters that describe an aspect of a business object or activity.

Record- collection of related data fields.

Table- collection of related records or documents dealing with one organization, person, area, or subject.

Database- a collection of integrated and related tables.

A database is also a collection of stored operational data used by the application systems of a particular enterprise.

Several things you can do:

Import data: into Access in the form of text files
Browse: navigate through the information
Query: find records that match specific criteria
Sort: rearrange records (alphabetically or numerically)
Print reports, labels, and form letters: a report is an ordered list of selected records and fields in an easy-to-read format.

For example, a large database can contain hundreds of interrelated tables.

We use databases for these reasons:

The amount of data increases exponentially over time,
Data are scattered through organizations,
Increasing amount of external data must be considered,
Data security is easily compromised.

With a database, we can manage all of these effectively.