what is microsoft access used for and how do i use it?

Question

need to apply for new job and they want experience of microsoft access

Answer 1

MS Access is Microsoft's answer for a self-contained database that can be used by non-technical persons, but is powerful enough so that is fairly useful for professionals.



It has dozens of wizards, and useful help, that can help you create pretty much anything on the database without actually knowing anything about databases.



Once you have created your data and entered a few lines of data, you can generate screens (forms) and reports to change and add, in the case of forms and view your data.



Queries can be created to extract, add, delete and change your data in whatever manner you pretty much want, again, wizards can help you here.



MS Access has powerful "JOINing" functionality that allows you to link tables together, so that you can create a "normalized" database without repeating data (too often), the rule of thumb for designing databases is not to store the same bit of data in more than one place.



For data, you can "Import" from many sources, but the most useful are Excel, Text files (either delimited or fixed width), other databases, but with Access databases it's probably better to use the Link facility.

Answer 2

Access is relational database program. It has full Visual Basic capability embedded into it so that it not only manages data, it can be used to design applications to link, collect, analyze, and report on data. Because it is relational, a database that is properly designed can maintain links or join relationships between various data from different sources or from various levels of data. Microsoft Access is at it best in a local environment (personal database) office application. That being said, Access can work reasonably well in a multi-user environment for small and medium size businesses. One approach is to split your database so that the data resides in a separate data-only database on a network, and users run local copies of the database (which contains all the design) with links to the "data" database. This minimizes design corruption that can sometimes occur over a network. Access has reasonable multi-level security controls albeit they take some getting used to. Newer versions of Access have a security wizard that helps with most aspects of securing a database.



As to the type of data, virtually anything you can do with Excel you might be able to do more efficiently with Access. The downside of Access is a bit of a learning curve but once you get your tables, queries, forms, and reports set up the way you want them - the design is controlled and your data updating/reporting will be simplified.



Have you ever had a chart or graph in Excel that you had to go back to update data ranges all the time? That's what Access can eliminate because it always crunches through all available data automatically. Reports and charts update any time based on new data entered. Actually the line between Excel and Access is a bit blurry. Excel can do database type things like forms, cell (data) validation, pivot tables, and queries (with mutliple data sources) thru MS Query. Similarly, Access is capable of almost all the calculations that Excel does - only the functions are embedded into queries, unbound fields in forms & reports, or VB code. Access can easily handle tens of thousands of records and related data if data is structured properly. Access easily handles data relationships and type, and full-blown reliable applications such as billing data, etc are possible IF you have somebody that knows database structure and VB code.



In summary, for thousands of records of business and time critical data with multiple users, you probably need to be at least considering a server-class database like Oracle for reliability and server class performance. If number of users is small, and if some downtime is tolerable (in case you need to recover from a corrupt database), and if your data is dynamic (in other words Excel becomes cumbersome) then Access is a really useful option.



Hope this answers your question which I think is about what kinds of things Access can do for a business like the one that that you're job seeking in.

Answer 3

Access is a database and a database is simply a list of related records listing all information you know on a specific subject and from which you query to pull out information you may need at any time. Your address book, the telephone book even is a database. It lists records of people's names and addresses and their telephone numbers. You could have a customer database containing several tables. The main table would be customer details. Each customer would be one record. Each record would contain fields. So a record for Joe Bloggs would consist of Title field (i.e. Mr, Mrs etc) First Name field (or initial), Surname Field, Address 1, Address2 and Address 3 fields, PostCode field and perhaps county field. Any other information about the customers should best be in a separate table. But say you have that one table and you want to write to all people in just one postcode area. From all the information in that table, you perform a query to pull out just the people in that postcode area. That is the main purpose of a database to extract information. Hope that helps. Most employers don't expect you to know how to design a database - because most don't know how themselves and seem to cram everything into just one table, but you probably will need to know how to enter data into an already existing database and to run queries which again have probably already been set up, and perhaps to print out reports which are merely the results of queries laid out in more pleasing format.

Answer 4

It's a database program. The best way is to get an Access for Dummies book and go through that. Maybe start with a database of your cd collection or something (artist/title/year/number of songs etc.).



It can have just one table, such as the cd collection one, but it can also have multiple tables such as one for products and one for customers which can be connected (a relational database) so you can 'pull' a product from the product table for a customer in the customer table.



It has wizards for creating forms.



It can be used in a basic form or in amuch more advanced way with visual basic controlling how it works.

Answer 5

It is a relational database programme; a refinement of SQL (structured query language).As you don't even know what it is you clearly don't have any experience of it.

It isn't like saying you have experience of typing when you think you can type, slowly, with one finger.

Typing data into tables isn't too difficult if you have exactly what you are to do explained to you.

Designing a relational database of any complexity is good degree from good University standard at the very least. Government has wasted zillions on databases that didn't work because they were designed by suits instead of anaraks.

Answer 6

MS Access is used for making ralational databases, mostly composed of tables.

Answer 7

Depends what they mean by experience.



If they want you to create databases you are not going to be able to blag it and will need to go on a crash course in a hurry as it is a very complex task to do correctly.