Components of a Microsoft Access database

When you open an instance of Microsoft Access, you encounter the database window, which is the control point of the different parts of your application.

From here, you can click an icon to access a specific category, referred to as objects. Microsoft Access keeps different details about your database in different formats. If you click the Tables button under the Objects button, you get to the Tables category.

Tables :

This is the central point of your development, because all data is stored in tables. The functioning of your database relies on how you design your tables. For better organization, you will have various tables in your database, each for a different purpose. For example, for a video club application, you would use one table to store employees information, another table to store customers records, yet another table to list different video tapes (their titles, ratings, actors names), etc.

A table is made of rows and columns.
A row is considered a Record, it is a group of details about one specific item of the table. It could contain a customer's name, his phone number, his member ID, his work number, his marital status, etc.


A column is a field representing one particular category of information about the records in the table. For example, it would hold the names of all actors in a particular movie, another column would hold the titles of different movies in the video store.

Queries:
A table can be large depending on the information it holds. To further organize your data, you should be able to retrieve necessary information for a specific purpose. The solution is to create a query (or queries) so that you will limit part of the data in a table for a specific goal, for better management or search. That's the role of a query.

Forms:
Tables are used to create the data in your database. Sometimes, they are not very cute, as far as the users are concerned. Forms are windows objects used to view and/or enter data in your database.

A form can combine data that is part of one or more tables or queries. Forms are the window interfaces that you usually will ask your users will access when editing data in your database.

Reports:
A report in the organized document that you will print from your data. A report can include different parts or details about your database; it includes data from a table or a query, it could also get its data from various tables, queries, forms, or data that is calculated from other data coming from different tables or forms.

Pages:
New to Microsoft Access 2000, Data Access Pages allow you to publish your forms as web pages on the Internet or on an intranet.

Macros:
Using Microsoft Access, you can customize certain behaviors of your application. Some of these behaviors can be automated through a combination of buttons. For example, you might want to open one document (form) from another. You can use macros to do that; in this case, you would not have to write code.

Modules:
Modules are pieces of code used to impose particular behaviors to your application to make it better. They are written in Microsoft Visual Basic. Modules are more flexible and extensive than macros, although they are usually written for various and particular circumstances. One example is to print a receipt after a customer has bought paint in a store.

Macros and Visual Basic code can be used on the same application. Sometimes you will prefer one to the other, and sometimes you will stick to VBA (Visual Basic for Applications).