Hello and welcome back to our course on Access 2013. In this section we’re going to create
a first database. But as part of doing this, rather than concentrating on what’s in the
database, I’m going to talk to you about the Access 2013 workspace. Let’s start with
the Access 2013 start screen. In the top right hand corner of this screen
you can see the conventional Windows buttons for Close which will close Access 2013, maximize
to maximize the window in the available space, and minimize. To the left you have a little
question mark icon and the question mark icon is the one that’s used to access Help. We’ll
be looking at Help later on in the course. Below that we have the details of the current
user or, to be more precise, the current account that Access is running in. Now the significance
of an account in Office 2013 in general and Access 2013 in particular I will also be talking
to you about later on, but you’re going to need to have an account if you want to
be able to use web apps. That gives you access to Microsoft SharePoint. But as I say, more
of that later. On the right hand part of the workspace when
you’re in the start screen, these individual tiles represent templates. You can think of
templates as sort of half built databases, sample databases, databases you can start
from. So if you like, if you were going to build your own house, maybe here somebody’s
given you some plans, done the walls and windows for you and left you to do the rest, that
sort of thing. And we’ll look at templates in a lot of detail later on. If I wanted to
create a new database, I might choose one of these templates. One of the templates I
can use is this one, Blank desktop database. That gives me a blank desktop database that
is a blank database; nothing in it. I can start completely from scratch. If I want a
database that I’m going to run as a web app, then the equivalent for that is Custom
web app. If I want to start my own web app I’m going to start there. Now as I mentioned
earlier on in the course, in the initial stages I’m really going to concentrate on desktop
databases but I will do a little web app demo in a while just to show you some of the key
differences and we will be coming back to web apps in more detail later on.
Now in its most straightforward form, an Access database is a file. And as with any other
component of Office 2013, you usually have the option: Do I want a new file? In this
case, a new database. Do I want to open an existing file? That’s what this option on
the left does; open other files. If you want to browse to find another database, you can
click on Open other files. But Access 2013 also keeps track of databases you’ve opened
recently. So you also have a list of recent, recently opened databases. Now the note here
says “You haven’t opened any files recently.” Well, that’s true. We’ve only just started.
To browse for a file start by clicking on Open other files, that’s the button below.
Once we get working on this installation of Access 2013 that recent file list, recent
database list, will start to build up. And again, we’ll talk about that a little bit
more later on. Now let me talk again about the templates
in the middle. There are a number of templates here but there are many others available.
At the top of that part of the start screen there, there is a box you can type a term
in, click on the magnifier as a start searching button, and you can search online in Office.com
for other templates that you can use for Access databases, and there are quite a few available.
Depending on your screen resolution, etc. you may or may not see more or less templates
then I can see here. But probably you’ll see a scroll bar on the right of the screen
and with the scroll bar on the right of the screen, you can scroll through the available
templates. Now as you can see I’ve only got about, well, there’s probably about
a dozen there I suppose. The names are quite important because some of them have the word
Desktop in them; so Desktop asset tracking. That means that it’s a desktop database
that will be generated. The ones that don’t have Desktop in them generally speaking are
web app type databases. You can also normally tell by the little symbol on the folded over
piece of paper, the one with the sort of picture of the world, that pattern on it, are really
the ones that are going to turn into web apps and they’re the ones that don’t have desktop
in the name. Now as I said, let’s just steer clear of web app for the moment. Let’s do
desktop contacts. If I wanted to create a desktop contacts database, that is a database,
think of it as a database that I’m just going to run on my PC just for me to use.
I’m going to click on Desktop contacts. Now when I select one of these templates,
what comes up is a description of what the template does. It tells me who provides it.
This one was provided by Microsoft Corporation. It tells me how big the download size is;
so how big a file is this template. And it gives me a rating based other people’s votes.
Now thousands of people will have used each of these templates. Not all of them will have
rated them. This one has got 7,311 votes and its rating is about 4 stars, so that’s probably
not bad. So what I’m now going to do is to create this database. Now it will be created
in a default location and with a default name. Note that the file extension on the database
that will be created, you can see it there in the file name; the file extension is .accdb
which stands for Access database. That’s the default file extension for an Access desktop
database. You’re going to see that file extension a lot. We’re going to rename this.
We’re going to save it somewhere else, etc. but we’re going to go with the defaults
for now. Note that there are little arrows to the right and the left, little buttons
which would let me step through the other available templates. So if I felt like trying
another one, I could have a look. I’m going to go back. That’s the one I’m going to
use, click on Create. Now the first thing it does is to download
the template from Microsoft and although it may not be obviously apparent to you to begin
with, I now have a database. Although you’ll see many variations on what’s in front of
you now, this is really the Access 2013 workspace and I want to just talk about a few aspects
of this workspace now and then cover it in more detail in the next section. First of
all, you will quite often see a security warning like this one and anything that’s a security
warning I tend to start with. Now let me just click here where it says Click for more details.
Let me just click there; security warning in yellow. Active content might contain viruses
and other security hazards. The following content has been disabled: VBA Macros. Generally
speaking, the most dangerous part of an Access database is any code, any VBA Macros that
it contains. If you get a template or a database from a source such as Microsoft, well I certainly
would tend to trust it and I certainly trust this particular template. I’ve used it many
times before in fact. If you are happy with what you’ve downloaded, what you’re accessing,
what you’re getting a warning about, then all you’d need to do is to say Enable content.
I would say in this case Enable all content because I’m happy that it’s safe enough
to use. Now once I’ve done that, what happens in this particular case is that some of that
program code runs and it starts to explain to me how to use the contact management database.
Now I don’t want to do this at the moment, so I’m going to just close this for now
and I’ll talk about it again later on. If you downloaded a template or a database from
somewhere other than Microsoft, maybe you were browsing the internet, you saw well somebody
said we’ll try this Access database, you downloaded it, and you got that message and
you weren’t 100% sure it was safe, then I would not enable content because it’s
pretty straightforward for that content to include code that may compromise your Access
installation or indeed your whole PC. That security warning system is there for a reason.
I always recommend that you take it seriously. Now I’m going to cover the rest of this
workspace in the next section and talk about what all the various things on the screen
are that you can see. But before I do that, I’m going to save this database. When I
create a new database the first thing I do pretty much always is to save it with a name
of my choosing. Now I’ve got two folders on my PC that I’m using for this course.
One of them is the same folder that you’ve got with the sample files in it. I’m not
going to save it there. I have a second folder where I’m going to keep the other files
that I’m using as we go through the course. These are the ones that you won’t normally
have access to and this is one of them. I know where that folder is. Before I save a
database, I close any objects in it that are open. That statement won’t mean much to
you at the moment but it will before too long. So I’m going to close what it says here,
Contact List, then I’m going to click on that button up there on the left that says
File. Then I’m going to go down here and click on Save As, Save database as, accept
the default, click on Save As. I see a Save As dialog. I’m going to browse to the folder
that I mentioned just now. There it is. It’s currently empty. And I’m going to give my
database a name. I’m going to call it Contacts 1. Note that it’s a Microsoft Access database.
So it has an .accdb extension. Click on Save and my database is saved. Now I once again
get the security warning. I know this is safe so click on Enable content and I would now
be able to work on my database. So we’re going to look at this workspace
in more detail in the next section. For the moment, I’ve finished working on my database.
I’ve saved the latest version so I can either close the database or, in this case, I’m
just going to close Access. So I’m going to use the Close button in the top right hand corner.
That’s it for now. I’ll see you in the next section.