To work with Access, the first thing you'll need to know is the terminology used in the menus and commands. We'll cover various bits of terminology as we go through this guide, but here's some good starting points:

• Tables - Tables store data in a database. You should have a table for each individual thing that you have data about, for example you might have a table for students, a table for modules, a table for tutors, a table for rooms, etc, and each of these tables would contain information about these.
• Records - A record in a row in the table and is an individual item of data and all of its associated information.
• Fields - A field is a column in a table where a particular piece of information about each record is stored.
• Objects - Objects are things you can create in Access to work with your database. Tables are a kind of object, and so are queries, forms, and reports, which we'll look at later in this guide.
• Relationships - Relationships in Access define how different fields of data in different tables relate to each other (hence using a relational database). We'll explore how to create and edit relationships later in this guide.

Access has various ways of opening and viewing the objects you need, and navigating between objects in your database.

When you open an Access database file, you may see a Security Warning banner in yellow, telling you that some active content has been disabled. You may need to choose Enable Content to ensure all features of the database work, but only do this if you trust the database and its creator.

Navigation Panel

All Access objects can be opened for viewing and editing via the navigation pane on the left (this can be minimised to a narrow vertical bar when not in use). To ensure all objects are visible, set to show Object type > All Access Objects.

Table Views

When you open an Access table, there are two different views: Design View and Datasheet View.

To open a table in Datasheet View, locate the table in the Navigation Pane and double click, or right click and choose Open.

To open a table in Design View, locate the table in the Navigation pane and right click then choose Design View.

If the table is already open, you can switch between the views by going to Home > Views > View and swapping between them.

Other objects, like queries, have various views as well, and we'll cover those when we get to those objects.

Viewing objects as windows or tabs

When you have multiple objects open, for example multiple tables open at once, there are two ways that Access can display this. By default, these will open as new windows, which can be maximised to fill the available screen area or manually adjusted to fill the space you want. This is referred to as Overlapping Windows.

However, you can change the view to a tabbed view, which shows all of the objects as full screen with a tab bar along the top to toggle between them.To change this, in Access select File > Options. In the Access Options dialogue box, select Current Database. In the Application Options section, change the Document Window Options to Tabbed Documents. You then may need to close and re-open the database.

As the example below shows, you can open a range of objects as tabs, such as tables and queries, and move between them easily by clicking on the tabs.

The datasheet view for a table displays all the fields (columns) and the records (rows) in that table. New records are added in the empty bottom row or by using the New (blank) record button at the bottom next to the navigation controls.

Key things to bear in mind when working with tables in datasheet view:

• The integrity of each record is maintained, meaning that each row always stays the same - you cannot sort or change one column and cause the order of one column to change without changing the rest so the rows stay the same.
• There is always one blank row at the bottom of the table.
• When a new record is added or existing data is edited, the unsaved record is shown by a pencil icon. Moving to another record will automatically save the edited record.
• The order of records in a table is not important. You will use queries to define your view of the data, including the order of the records.
• You can open and work with several Access tables (and other objects) at the same time.
• Column widths and row heights can be manually adjusted, but all rows have to be the same height.

An Access file, typically with a .accdb file extension, is usually referred to as an Access database, and contains all the tables, queries and any other objects that form that database.

You save the overall Access database file with a suitable name and then save the individual tables, queries, forms, and reports with other sensible names. For example, you might have a database called Training.accdb and then within it, tables called Sessions, Students, Marks, and Trainers. There also might be queries called qrySessionTrainers and qryStudentMarks, as typically query names start with qry. Often report names start with rpt and form names start with frm. You'll notice that these examples don't have spaces in them - this helps to prevent errors in Access so it is best practice to use camelCase, i.e. start each letter of a new word with a capital letter, when naming things in Access.

Always keep backups of your Access database. The files can corrupt so regular backups are best so you don't lose any recent updates if you need to revert to a backup copy.

Compact and Repair