Lesson 1

This course is the fourth of a four-course series on Microsoft Access. This course gives a hands-on look at the features in Access 2013, Microsoft’s popular database program. Microsoft Access is a very powerful database system, giving you features like no other program can. As with other systems, with power comes complexity and you can quickly get Access up and running using the built-in wizards. But once you have gone beyond where the wizards can take you, making Access perform more advanced tasks can become troublesome.
If you have been using Access for a while but feel you should be able to get more out of your database, this is the course for you.

After completing the course, you will be able to:

1. Increase the referential integrity of your Access Databases
2. Connect Access with the Web through a new feature called Data Access Pages
3. Work with the more complex Access features for simple security, application settings, and other add-ins
4. Automate tasks by using macros
5. Share data between Access and other Microsoft Office applications

In the next lesson, we will examine the course prerequisites.

Although parent-child is the most common expression used to explain the relationship between tables related in a one-to-many relationship, you may hear other expressions used, such as master-detail, applied to this design. The important thing to keep in mind is that the intent of referential integrity is to prevent lost records on the "many" side of the relationship. Referential integrity guarantees that there will never be an orphan (a child record without a matching parent record). As you work with related tables, it is important to keep in mind which table is on the "one" side and which is on the "many" side. Notice how difficult it would be to record all the orders for a customer if a separate table were not used to store the order's information. Each time a customer places an order with Northwind Traders, a new record is added to the Orders table. In a one-to-many arrangement, only the CustomerID (for example, AROUT) is added to the Orders table. The CustomerID is a foreign key that relates the order back to the Customers table. Keeping the customer information is relatively trivial because each customer record appears only once in the Customers table.