Welcome back to our course on Access 2013. In the previous section we created our first
database and we called it Contacts 1. Now that I’ve exited Access and just restarted
it, you can see the recent files list at the top left. Think of it as a recent databases
list in the case of Access. Right at the top of that list is Contacts 1. The most recently
opened database will appear at the top of that list. Now as I work through a succession
of databases with Access 2013 the latest ones I’ve accessed will be at the top of the
list, these will move further down the list and will actually drop off the list over time.
But there’s a little button on the right, a little picture of a push pin. If I click
that, it pins a particular database to the recent list. So if for example, I have a database
that I work on quite a lot but maybe not very frequently by clicking on that button, I will
pin it to the list and it will always appear in the recent files list until I unpin it
again. So that’s a pretty useful tip to know about. But for the moment, lets open
Contacts 1 again just by clicking it in the list.
Now one thing I should mention here is that as with the other components of Office 2013,
there are many different ways of doing most things in Access. At this stage in the course
I’m not going to stop at every point and show you every different way of doing something.
My emphasis at the moment is getting you up to speed so that you can start to work on
databases relatively quickly. I’ll come back to some of the alternative ways of doing
things later on in the course, depending on the amount of time that’s available.
So let’s start by having a look in more detail at the Access 2013 workspace. I’m
going to take you on a tour in this section and then in subsequent sections we’ll go
into each part in quite a bit more detail. For the benefit of those of you who’ve never
used the Ribbon before, let me explain that the Ribbon is this block that you can see
outlined here. It’s arranged in what are called tabs and at any time, the tab that’s
selected has a sort of three-quarters of a rectangle around it. So the Home Tab is currently
selected. Then we have the Create Tab. If I click on Create, watch what happens in the
Ribbon. I get a different content. These are all commands that I can use in Access. I’ll
talk about those in a couple of sections time. We basically have four tabs here that are
pretty much always here when you’re working in the main Access window. So that’s the
Ribbon. Above the Ribbon to the top left we have something
called the Quick Access Toolbar, and the Quick Access Toolbar contains some buttons that
you might want to always be able to access quickly. Now I’m going to talk about the
Quick Access Toolbar in detail in a later section as well.
Right at the bottom of the window, you see what’s called the Status Bar, and the status
bar which currently says Form View on the left and has some buttons on the right, gives
us information about what’s currently happening; what we’ve currently got selected in Access
2013. The status bar will also be covered in detail in a later section.
Now on the left we have a panel which is called the Navigation Pane and in many ways, the
navigation pane is the sort of nerve center for working within an Access database. It
lists the objects that comprise the database. In a database you’ll normally have tables;
you’ll have queries, forms, usually reports, often macros, often modules as well. With
each of these, you can list the items in each of these categories by clicking. So for instance,
I’ve just clicked tables to hide all the tables and clicked again to show them. Our
current database has two tables in it, a contacts table and a settings table. At any time, I
can work on a table or a query or a form or a report, etc.
Now one of the objects in my database is currently open. The object that’s open is the contact
list and that’s what you can see in the main window on the right here. In fact, this
contact list is open in such a way that I could actually type the details of a contact
in here. So I’ve actually got the database open in a way that I could enter some data.
Now this is called the Contact List and you’ll note from the Navigation Pane that the contact
list is actually one of my forms. The forms are the main user interface between the database
and users. Users use forms to enter data, change data, delete records, and so on; all
things that we’re going to look at in later sections. So the contact list is a form.
Now if I chose another form such as the Contact Details form and right click on contact details,
it gives me a number of options and the options include not only the ability to open the form,
the contact list here is open, but for contact details, I could actually go into Design View.
Now when I click Design View, what I finish up with is two of my database objects open.
So I’ve got the original contact list open. Notice when I click on that I can see the
contact list. That’s what I could see before. And I’ve got contact details. So I’ve
got two forms open. But one of them is opened in a way where I could actually enter contact
details as though I were a regular user of the database. But the other one is open in
what’s Design View and this is where I can actually change the design of a form, not
enter data about a contact but change the design of a form. Going back to the contact
list, if I opened the contact list in Design View, I could change the layout of this form,
how I present it to my users; more on all of that later on.
Much of the time in Access 2013 we’re going to be working on objects by selecting them
here in the main window, doing things to a particular form, entering data or changing
the layout or whatever we might decide to do. When we finished working on an object,
in this case contact details for example, we have a Close button on the right. Note
the little tip there that says Close contact details. Click on Close and the object is
closed. Contact list is still open; click on Close, the contact list is closed as well
now. Now the Navigation Pane is an extremely important
part of the, if you like, infrastructure of Access 2013 because it’s the simplest way
usually of getting access to an object so that we can work on it. You can make some
useful changes to the Navigation Pane. For example, if you want to make it a bit wider,
you can drag it to the right. If you want to make it a bit thinner, you can drag it
to the left. It’s very often the case particularly if you have very complex forms and tables
and so on that you just need more space to work and there are various ways of giving
yourself more space to work in Access 2013. One of them is to hide the Navigation Pane
and there’s a sort of double button there and its tip says “Shutter Bar Open/Close
button”. If you click on that then the Navigation Pane just disappears over on to the left here,
you just get a little strip left on the left. If you need to open it up again, you just
tick that and the Navigation Pane is back to the size you had it before.
Now the last thing I’d like to show you on this quick tour of the main features of
the Access 2013 workspace is what you get if you click on this File button on the top
left here. Click on File and you go into what’s called Backstage View. I think the best way
to think of Backstage View is it’s the place you go to do everything to a database that
isn’t actually part of the database. Now we use Backstage View a little bit earlier
on. I didn’t actually say then what it was. But it gives you access to things like Save
As. So you would go into Backstage View to do a Save As to save a database with a particular
name. You also go there to print. You can go there to close. You also have a couple
of other very important options there. Right at the top there is an Info Page, that’s
the page that’s shown at the moment, and there are two things we can do from there
in particular: Compact and repair, and Encrypt with password. I’m going to talk about both
of those later on. You can also from here access New; so if you want a new database,
click on New and it’s another way of seeing that list of templates. Further down, we have
information about the current account; the account we’re running under. That’s the
account that I spoke about right at the beginning of the course and we’re going to look at
account a bit later on. And then we also have another page called Options and we’re going
to look at the options in a couple of sections from now. So the main thing to remember at
the moment is that Backstage View has a lot of very important functions to perform when
you’re working in Access. When you’ve done whatever you’re going to do in Backstage
View, there’s this left pointing arrow at the top, click on that, and it takes you back
into the database you’re working on, if indeed you are working on a database at that
time. So that’s our quick tour of the Access 2013
workspace and we’re now going to have a couple of short sections where I’m going
to talk about a couple of things that you really need to know before we get started.
We’re going to look at Help for example, how to get help. But in the meantime,
that's it for this section. I’ll see you in the next one.