As with most Windows 95/98/NT/2000 programs, Access can be executed by navigating the Start menu in the lower left-hand corner of the Windows Desktop. A view of a Windows Desktop is given here:
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To start Access, click on the Start button, then the Programs menu, then move to the MS Office menu and finally click on the Microsoft Access menu item. The MS Office Professional menu is shown below.
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Note that this arrangement of menus may vary depending on how MS Office was installed on the PC you are using.
Once Access is running, an initial screen will be displayed:
From this initial screen, the user can create a new database (either blank or with some tables created with the database wizard), or open up an existing database.
In general, the first time one begins a project, a new, blank database should be created. After that point, use the Open existing database option to re-open the database created previously.
Warning - If you have previously created a database, and then create it again using the same name, you will overwrite any work you have done.
For the purposes of this tutorial, if you are going through these steps for the first time, choose the option to create a new, blank database as shown in the above figure.
By selecting Blank Database and clicking on the OK button, the following screen will appear in order to give the new database a file name. Fill in File Name as a:\bankdb.mdb and click on the Create button to create the database as in the following figure:
In the above file name, the a:\ indicates that the new database will be created on the A: disk drive. bankdb is the name chosen for this particular database and .mdb is the three letter extension given for Microsoft DataBase files.
It is advisable to keep the name of the database (bankdb in the above example) relatively short and do not use spaces or other punctuation in the name of the database. Also, the name of the database should reflect the database's contents.
Once the new database is created, the following main Access screen will appear (for Access '97):
For Access 2000, the screen looks slightly different:
The two main features of this main screen are the menu bar that runs along the top of the window and the series of tabs in the main window. The menu bar is similar to other Microsoft Office products such as Excel. The menus include:
The tabs in the main window for the database include:
In MS Access 2000, these tabs appear along the left hand side of the window by default. MS Access 2000 also adds some selections such as Web Pages and Favorites (not covered in this tutorial).
This tutorial focuses on the first four tabs: Tables, Queries, Forms and Reports.
To open an existing database, choose Open an Existing Database, highlight More Files... and click on the OK button. Then navigate to the A: drive, highlight the existing database file on the floppy disk and click the OK button again to open the database.