Hello again and welcome back to our course on Access 2016.
It’s time now to start Access and to start using it.
So on Windows 10 what I’m going to do is to type in the Search box down here or start
typing Access.
Straightaway I see Access 2016 appear, click and that starts up Access.
If you’re using Windows 7 then depending on how you’ve installed it you may already
have a shortcut on the desktop.
You may get it from the Start menu.
If you’re using Windows 8 then you’ll be using the Windows Start screen.
You can start typing Access 2016, the name will appear, click, and when it starts up
it’ll look something like this.
In fact whichever version of Windows you’re using the start screen should look like this,
subject of course to what I said earlier about the size, shape and resolution of your screen.
Now I suggest that if you don’t already have a shortcut on your desktop for Access
or you haven’t already put a shortcut on your taskbar you straightaway now pin this
to the taskbar or put a shortcut on the desktop because you’re going to be starting and
stopping Access quite a bit from now on.
So in Windows 10 I’m going to go down here to the Access icon on the taskbar, right click
and I’m going to say Pin to Taskbar and it’s there now for me to use from now on.
Over the next two or three sections we’re going to be delving into the Access workspace.
And in order to cover the many things that I need to explain I’m going to sort of spread
them out over two or three sections and in the process we’re going to create a couple
of databases.
Now on the start screen if you go up to the top right hand corner you have conventional
Windows buttons, Close, Maximize, Minimize.
And then on the left you have a question mark and the question mark is the button that gives
you access to Access Help.
I’m going to be talking about Access Help in a few sections from now so I’m going
to otherwise ignore it for the moment.
Underneath those buttons you have the Account Details.
This is the account that’s currently responsible for this copy of Access.
Now of course your account name will be different from mine and whether you’re using Access
2016 from an Office 365 subscription or a purchased copy of Access 2016 you will be
running under a Microsoft account.
And in various ways that account is important in various contexts, as we’ll see later
on.
But for the moment as long as you’ve got an account there and it’s right it’s not
of importance in the short term to us which account it is.
Now over on the left we have a panel which will normally show the recently opened databases.
And this gives us access to work that we’ve been doing recently.
So at any one time I may have three or four databases that I’m working on.
And if I need to do work on one of those I just click on whichever one it is in that
list and it will open up for me.
Now this is a brand new installation of Access 2016 so there are no recent databases but
there soon will be.
If I want to work on a database that isn’t in my recent list, so maybe it’s one I haven’t
worked on in this installation, maybe it’s one I’ve got from somebody else.
Then the Open Other Files option here gives me access to a standard Windows browser and
I can open whatever I need to open to work on the relevant database.
So that panel on the left lets me work on something that I’ve worked on before.
But the main part of the start screen, the main section on the right, gives me templates
for creating new databases.
Now generally speaking in Access 2016 databases can be of two types.
One type is what we call a desktop database.
This is the traditional type of Access database where basically you have a database that sits
on your desktop and you use it generally locally for maintaining data.
Now in fact you can share that database.
You can split the database into components.
There’s all sorts of things you can do with it.
But in its standard default form it’s usually a single file that sits on a desktop device.
But the alternative now is the web app.
And a web app is a database that is used online.
So this is usually one that you’ll be sharing with other people.
Now we’re going to be looking at both desktop databases and web apps during this course.
And generally speaking if you look at this section on the right each of those icons corresponds
to a different type of database.
If you like a sort of starting point.
What we call a database template.
Now by looking at the icon you can tell what sort of database it is.
A web app generally has one of those big circles, like a global circle at the background.
Whereas a desktop database has what looks like a sort of spreadsheet shape behind.
And the description will normally tell you what it is a database for.
So here we have a contacts database.
Here we have a task management database.
And if I scroll down this list you’ll see many other database templates.
Some of them are desktop, some of them are web apps.
Now sometimes when you need to create a database one of these templates may well get you started
because as you’ll see in a moment the template will normally contain some of the building
blocks that will potentially help you with creating your database.
Sometimes, however, you’ll want to start from scratch.
And on this course we’re going to start from scratch at least once.
Up in the top left hand corner of this part of the start screen we have an option to create
a blank desktop database and we also have an option to create a custom web app.
And we’ll be looking at those later on in the course.
Let’s suppose though that you want to use one of the templates that already has some
content in it.
And suppose you want to look for a contacts database.
Now one option is to just click on this one here, Updated Contacts.
The Updated there refers to the fact that the template has been updated in this version.
But you might want to see what other contacts databases are available.
Well right at the top of the screen there is a Search for online templates box.
And if I type in there Contacts provided I am online, and this is another situation where
you need to be online, I can search for Contacts Database Templates, see what ones are available
on Microsoft.com.
So click on Start Searching and of course the one that we saw just now is amongst the
potential templates to use here.
But there are others as well.
There’s a Personal Contact Manager.
There’s a SharePoint web app for contacts.
There’s a Faculty database which presumably includes a contacts facility.
And down here we’ve got a Task Management database and a Call Tracker database.
Alongside these there are a number of other documents associated with other Office applications.
So there are 47 Word templates, 21 Excel templates, 10 Publisher templates, and 4 PowerPoint templates.
So you may well find amongst those documents or PowerPoint presentations that might help
you either to document your database or indeed use your database.
So that Search facility can be very useful to locate database templates that can give
you a good starting point.
Now what I’m going to do on this occasion is to just use this Updated Contacts template.
So let me click on that and I see a panel.
It gives me an outline of a contact list.
It says, Updated contacts provided by Microsoft.
There’s a description of the database.
It tells me the download size, 160K.
So it’s not a particularly big file.
There’s a link there.
Should I create an Access app or an Access desktop database?
I’m going to talk about that a little bit later on.
At the moment we’re going for the desktop database option.
In fact in the early part of the course I’m really going to concentrate on desktop databases
and we’ll look at web apps more later on.
Now when you create this database it will be given a file name and the file name by
default is there, Database3.accdb.
Now what that file name is will depend on what you’re doing at that time.
I’ll explain that to you more later on.
But it also tells you where the database will be created and it has a default location there
for databases.
There is a Browse button here that I can use to put the database in a different location.
Now at the moment I’m just going to accept those defaults because I am going to create
a database but I’m going to save it a little bit later on for reasons that will become
apparent.
If I decide that I’m happy with the sounds of this database, so I read the description
and I think, “Yep, I’ll give that try” all I need to do is to click on Create and
it will be created.
But I may also want to step through other available templates and there’s a right
button or a Next button there and there’s a Previous button there and I can use those
to step me through other available database templates to see if any of those are more
likely to fit my requirements.
On this occasion I’m going to carry on with Updated Contacts.
I’m going to click on Create.
And if Access 2016 needs to download the template it will.
But when it’s downloaded the template it will then create for me an empty database.
And we’re now inside Access and we’re looking at the Access workspace.
Now the details of this workspace I’m going to concentrate on over the next few sections.
But I’d just like to concentrate on a couple of aspects here.
I just said that it created an empty database.
Well in a sense it is empty because there are no contacts in the database.
But it’s not empty from the point of view of definitions because what Access has done
and what has been achieved by using that template is that it’s given me a starting point for
a contact list.
And you can see the empty contact list there.
And part of this starting point is a definition of the information that I will have about
each of my contacts.
So if you look at these headings along here it’s got First Name, Last Name, Company,
Job Title, etcetera.
Now you may look at that list and say well that’s okay but I would also keep details
of something else and maybe I wouldn’t bother with a job title, for example.
Well changing the database, customizing it to your requirements is normally one of the
things that you would do when you start with a template.
So don’t be put off by the fact that you look at something like this and you say, “Well
that’s not quite how I would do it” because we really are going to major in this course
on customizing the starting points that you get from templates.
The other thing to bear in mind, although I’m not going to look at it in detail for
a couple of sections yet.
If you look at this panel on the left it tells you what is included in this template.
So not only do you have Tables, Contacts and Settings but you have Queries, you have Forms,
you have Reports, you have Macros, you have Modules.
Now I’m going to explain what all of these are during the course but this is in fact
although it’s quite a straightforward example typical of what you will get in a template.
It will come with some tables, some queries, some forms, some reports, etcetera, and they’re
your starting point for your database.
Another very common feature is that you will be given a security warning.
Generally speaking when you open a database or create a new database using a template
in Access 2016 Access normally defaults to being cautious.
It is relatively straightforward for somebody to put harmful program code in a database.
And before you run any program code in a database you need to consider where you got the database
from.
Now a Microsoft template is a pretty safe place to get something from.
So if you trust what you’ve just opened or created you click on the Enable Content
button here and you’re now able to freely work on that database.
Now in this particular case once you’re said, “Yep, I trust this database” it
gives you a welcome screen to the contacts database.
And this welcome screen actually corresponds to a macro that runs when you open the database.
And what this screen will do is to give the user information about how to use the contact
database.
When you come to creating your own databases you may also want to create help screens and
welcome screens.
And we’ll look at that later on in the course.
But for the moment I’m going to close this screen using the Close button up on the right.
And in fact what I’m going to do now is to close Access itself using its Close button.
That’s the end of this section.
Please join me for
the next one.