Hello and welcome to our course on Access 2016.
My name is Toby and I’m your instructor on this course.
I’m a Microsoft certified professional and my specializations include Microsoft databases
and Access is a product that I’ve been using for a long time.
It’s also a product that has changed significantly in the last couple of versions and it’s
now much more flexible and much more powerful than it’s ever been.
So I’m really looking forward to showing you how to use Access and in particular I’m
looking forward to helping you to find out how Access can help you to manage some at
least of the large amount of data that we all deal with nowadays in both our lives and
our home lives.
So first of all who is this course for?
When I designed the course I really had three groups of people in mind.
First of all people who’ve never used Access before, maybe never used a database before
or at least not knowingly.
And very certainly who’d never designed a database or built a database before.
If you like they’re the primary group of users that course is intended for and I’m
really going to start Access from scratch.
However, I will assume that you have a reasonable knowledge of the use of Windows software.
If you’ve used components of the Microsoft Office suite, such as Word and PowerPoint
and Excel, then you should have plenty of knowledge of the use of Windows software to
follow this course.
But I do assume that you can find your way around the Windows application.
So you’ll understand things like icons and clicking and double-clicking and right-clicking
and so on.
The second group of users are people who’ve used a very much older version of Access,
maybe Access 2000 or 2003.
For those people the current version is so different that it’ll probably be a bit of
a shock.
You may not even have used Access with the Ribbon interface that’s been with us now
for nearly ten years.
So you probably need a pretty big refresh in your knowledge of Access to be able to
take full advantage of this latest version.
The third group of people are users of more recent versions of Access.
And if you’re in this third group you may well have used the Ribbon before but you may
not be familiar with the latest features, including features such as the creation and
use of web apps, for example.
Now for that third group and to some extent for the second group I will try to point out
from time to time sections of the course where maybe if you’ve used Access before you don’t
need to follow that section because it probably only contains material that you’re familiar
with anyway.
But in general terms I think it will benefit all of you to go through the whole course
in sequence step by step because there may well be things that you need a refresher on
or maybe when you tried to use them before you weren’t exactly clear on what was going
on.
And I am going to try to explain things systematically in what I believe is a logical learning sequence.
Now during the early sections of this course I’m going to have to cover some basic material,
some introductory material.
Some of it you may be able to skip, some of it you certainly won’t.
But here are a few points, important points just to get us started.
The version of Access that I’m going to be using is the full-blown desktop version
of Access 2016.
I’ll tell you a little bit more about versions later on but it’s the desktop version that
I’m using.
I also need to make it clear that I’m not going to be covering what’s called VBA programming
on this course.
If you’ve got no idea what VBA programming is then don’t worry about it.
We will be looking at macros a little but we won’t be covering programming.
So this is not a programming course.
And also I’m recording this course on a touch device, but I won’t really be using
touch very much at all during the course.
In fact in a few sections from now I’m going to explain touch in relation to Access, in
fact in relation to Office in general just to give you a few hopefully useful pointers.
But virtually all of this course is done using mouse and keyboard.
If you are using a touch device you should be able to follow the course through perfectly
well but I’m not going to explain everything twice because it would make the course extremely
long.
It’ll be long enough as it is.
But basically I use mouse and keyboard on this course.
And another very important point is that you will need to have a live internet connection
for many features on the course.
Now to be fair there’s an awful lot you can do without being connected to the internet
but for some things, such as online help and for downloading database templates and certain
other things you will definitely need a live internet connection.
And when we start looking up web apps you’ll need a connection as well.
And one final introductory point.
I’m recording this on a widescreen device.
It’s 16x9 display.
So the way that my screen looks and the amount that I can get on the screen, and it’s quite
a big screen, may well be different to yours.
Essentially whatever we’re doing the content should be about the same but it may look different
depending on the size and shape of your screen.
But bear in mind that I’m using a widescreen desktop PC to record this and I’m recording
it on Windows 10, but more on that in the next section.
In the next section I’m going to talk to you about acquiring Access 2016 and getting
it installed and working.
If you already have Access 2016 on your device and it is installed and working you can skip
the next section.
But if not please join me for that.