Read an Excerpt
PREFACE: Introduction
Many of you will have picked up this book because the title, In Business with Access, has caught your attention. You work in business and you know that you need greater access to information. You may work in a large corporation, you may have your own business that you run from your home, or you may own or work for one of the thousands of "small businesses" that make up a great part of our business community. The need for information becomes more important each day, and the need for current information becomes even more critical. Microsoft Access is a flexible yet powerful relational database management system. By learning to use Access, you will gain the power to make use of the torrent of information that you are flooded with each day.
This book is written specifically for the business person who needs greater access to information. Absolutely no programming skills are needed to follow and learn from the examples. The necessary skills will be learned by doing, through building of several applications that can be directly applied to your own business.
Each of you requires information to make the decisions necessary for the day-to-day running of your business. With the current climate of downsizing in many businesses, more people are being required to perform a greater variety of tasks. The competitive nature of business also requires you to be able to access a wider collection of information than may have been previously required, distilling this raw data into a meaningful whole. Your own specific information needs, while unique to your position and your company, can be classified into some general categories:
Abusiness owner will require a more general overview of the flow of products or cash in and out of your business. You will need to be able to forecast the general trends in your sales and cash flow.
A sales manager will require information about your customers and their needs. You will also need information about products that you provide, and products that will become available in the near future.
An accounting manager will need information about sales volume, product levels, account payments and receivables aging, accounts payables, and cost of goods compared to sales.
A purchasing manager requires information about expected product needs, pricing and costs, current stock levels, lead times, accounts payable, vendor reliability, and manufacturing requirements.
While many of these information needs overlap, often they overlap at the raw information level. The specific form that the information takes is different for each group of information users. For example, all businesses provide a product, whether the product is goods or services. Each of the four groups above requires information about the business' products.
The business owner will want to know what margin she can expect from the products and how many times the inventory can be turned.
The sales manger needs to know if the product will meet his customers' needs for a price they are willing to pay, and whether it will be available when needed.
The accounting manager sees the product as part of the accounts payable, and a dollar value assigned to the balance sheet.
The purchasing manager requires information about the cost of a specific item, how often it will turn over, its selling price, and how long it takes to replenish.
As you can see, each one requires different information about the same raw data.
Whatever your role, this book will teach you the basic tools that you need to gather, extract, and present the information you need to make critical decisions for your business today and tomorrow.
How You Will Learn
You will learn to use Access for your own business needs by following the examples given.
The primary example used throughout this text is a purchase order system, and it is covered in great detail. In addition to the purchase order, most chapters contain a section called Other Applications, where you will build two additional applications. These applications are not related directly to everyday accounting information and help to show you other possibilities to which you can put a database to work. The first application is a mailing list manager, and the second is a vehicle maintenance scheduler.
Each chapter contains a section called What You Can Do?, in which many common business questions are posed. Each question is then answered at the end of the chapter in How It's Done. Specific techniques that you learned throughout the chapter are highlighted, showing you how they apply to the specific question.
This book is organized into five sections, presenting basic database functions first, and more complex subjects later. As you work through the chapters, you will learn not only how a database works, but how to make it do the work that you require, providing you with current and accurate information.
In the first section, Introduction, you are introduced to Microsoft Access and its basic functions.
In the second section of this text, Using Tables, you learn how to use the most basic Microsoft Access database object, the table. You will learn how to build tables for storing information, and then how to add and manipulate the information contained in them.
In the third section, First Forms and Queries, you become acquainted with two more Microsoft Access objects forms and queries. You learn to build and use a form for viewing, adding, and editing data within a table. You will learn to create a customized form for specific uses, and then to use a query to select and sort records.
In the fourth section, Advanced Queries and Forms, you learn to combine tables together using a query. You also learn to move or delete selected records from a table. You then learn to build forms that are based on either a query or multiple tables. In this section, you learn to utilize the real power of Microsoft Access.
In the fifth and final section, Reports, you learn to build printed reports. You will learn to use expressions to display totals, subtotals, and combine multiple fields into a single report field.
As you work with the examples in this book, you will learn all of the concepts necessary to build a working database application, to gather information from many sources into an easily understood and controlled format. You will find that you will get the most out of this book if you are sitting down at your computer, taking the time to work through the examples. Once you have gained the basic concepts from a chapter, you may want to try expanding on this knowledge by trying the suggestions in the section titled Other Applications.
Conventions Used in this Book
This book uses standard typographic styles throughout to help you to distinguish between text that you read and text that you type into various dialog boxes, text boxes, and expression boxes. Additional styles are used to indicate menu options you are to select, or keys to be pressed.
All text that you are to type is shown in boldface type.
Keys that you are to press in combination, pressing and holding the first while you then press the second, will be indicated by a plus sign between the keys: for example, Ctrl+Tab, or Alt+F4. Shortcut key combinations that perform menu option commands are also shown in this same way. For example, Ctrl+P displays the Print dialog box and is the shortcut key combination for the Print option on the File drop-down menu list.
To choose menu options with the keyboard requires that you press the letter of the menu that is underlined on your screen. This underlined letter is called a hot key. In this book the underlined letter will be displayed in bold type. Pressing the required Alt or F10 key to activate the main menu is assumed and is not indicated. Successive menu selections will be shown separated by a comma, like: File, New Database.
The names of command buttons, check boxes, option buttons, list boxes, and combo boxes that you select will also have their hot key shown in bold type.
Toolbar buttons will be listed by the name displayed in the ToolTips name box along with the toolbar on which the button is located, such as: Select the Open Database button on the Database toolbar.
What You Need to Run Microsoft Access
Microsoft Access has certain minimum requirements for your computer to run the program. As with most computer software, more, bigger, and faster is always better.
An 80386 running at 20Mhz or better PC.
At least 6 megabytes (MB) of RAM is required and 8MB is better.
You must have Microsoft Windows, Windows for Workgroups, or Windows NT installed on your computer.
A VGA or better monitor, and a mouse or other pointing device that will work under Microsoft Windows.
A hard disk with approximately 20MB free for installing Microsoft Access.