Hello again and welcome back to our course on Access 2016.
In this section I’m going to take you on a tour of the Access workspace.
And in subsequent sections I’m going to look at various aspects of that workspace
in more detail.
Now first of all when I open Access now my recent databases list is getting longer each
time.
As the list grows eventually databases start dropping off the bottom of that list.
But if I have a particular database that I use perhaps not very often but which I want
to always have available there, say the EspritDeTour database, you see a little pushpin over here
on the side.
Now if I click on that pushpin so that it changes from being a horizontal pushpin to
a vertical pushpin I have pinned it to the list.
And that means it won’t fall off of the bottom of the list.
No matter how long the list gets EspritDeTour will still be on that list.
Now on this occasion as I’m going to be going through several versions of Esprit DeTour
I’m not going to pin it.
But that’s a very useful tip if you want to have a particular database that’s always
available.
So what I’m going to do now is to go into the Contacts database and we’re going to
look at the Access 2016 workspace with the Contacts01 database open.
So let me now take you through the main features of the workspace and I’ll talk about some
of the sections that we’ve got coming up to describe and explain these in more detail.
First of all at the top of the workspace we have this big block here called the Ribbon.
And for those of you not familiar with the Ribbon interface I’m going to be covering
that in a couple of sections from here.
I am going to talk a little about the concept behind customizing the Ribbon but I’m not
actually going to go through a full example of it.
But I am going to talk about customizing the Quick Access Toolbar which we’ll come to
in just a moment and that should give you a good idea of how to set about customizing
the Ribbon.
Above the Ribbon and to the left of it is the Quick Access Toolbar.
And if I click on the little dropdown at the righthand end that gives me a list of the
most popular commands to use in Access and also access to facilities to customize the
Quick Access Toolbar.
And we’re going to cover that three sections from now.
Right at the bottom of the workspace we have the Status Bar.
It’s above my Windows taskbar.
And if I right click on the Status Bar you see the heading there Customize Status Bar.
I’m going to explain the Status Bar to you in about five or six sections from now.
What you might consider to be the nerve center of an Access database is this panel on the
left that we normally refer to as the Navigation Pane.
And this lists all of the objects in an Access database.
The objects are categorized.
So we have Tables, Queries, Forms, etcetera.
And with each category we can expand or collapse the category to see its contents.
In the current Contact Management database we have two tables.
We have a Contacts table and a Settings table.
The tables category can be collapsed using the little double chevron on the right, as
can queries, forms, etcetera.
In a large, complex database you may have dozens or even hundreds of objects.
And so being able to expand and collapse those categories can be very useful.
Now regarding the Navigation Pane itself, a lot of the time you’ll have the Navigation
Pane open because you’ll be using it to access different objects in the database.
But you can almost totally hide it.
There’s a double left pointing chevron there, shutter bar open/close button.
If you click on that it makes the Navigation Pane just a little thin bar down the left
and now you’ve got a right pointing double arrow.
You can open it again.
And you can change the width in the normal way making it wider or thinner.
When you get a pretty big Access database you may need to search for a particular form
or report or query or something.
So there’s a Search facility.
And if you click on this dropdown there are a number of other options that can help you
to find and otherwise deal with objects via the Navigation Pane.
And we’ll come back to using that facility later on in the course.
Now what you can see in the main window here is what’s called the Contact List.
And the Contact List looks like a spreadsheet and basically it is a spreadsheet.
But it is a spreadsheet representing the data in one of the tables.
But it’s not actually a table itself.
It’s actually a form.
Let me just open up the forms.
There are currently three forms in this database.
There is the Contact List which is open now, the Welcome and this is the welcome screen
that you’ve seen a few times already, and there is a Contact Details form.
The Contact List will show in spreadsheet fashion all of the contacts in the contacts
table.
Don’t forget we have up here a contacts table.
And each contact would occupy one row, one horizontal row on the Contact List form.
But let me open the other form here, the Contact Details form.
I can open it either by right clicking and selecting Open or I can just double click
on it.
And this form works in a very different way because this one shows all the details for
one contact on one form.
So it’s the sort of form you might use in an application where you were say going to
ask somebody to update their contact details and you gave them the option of putting in
additional phone numbers and their home address and so on.
Now both the Contact List and the Contact Details are forms but they’re very different
types of form.
And in different situations you may want each of those forms to perform quite different
functions.
When I open a form like that you’ll see that it looks as though it’s sort of hovering
over the page.
Let me just close it again.
Apart from opening a form just to see how it’s going to look in real life, if you
like, the other option I have is going into the design of the form.
If I wanted to change what’s actually on that form or perhaps the sequence of the items
on the form if I go into Design View that’s a very different thing altogether because
now if I say wanted to move this panel around with all these fields in it, maybe I wanted
to move it further down on the form, this is how I would change the design of the form.
So there’s a very big difference between a form in design mode and a form in what we
normally call open mode or run mode.
When I finish working on something such as this Contact Details form note the little
Close button here.
Close Contact Details.
Do I want to save the changes?
On this occasion I don’t.
I have made changes to that form but I’m not going to save those.
So I’m just going to click on No.
So sometimes we’ll open forms in order to use them to add data or change data and sometimes
we’ll open forms in Design Mode if we actually want to change the design of the form.
So if you take this Contact List, for example, it’s currently open.
Let me close it.
Let me right click on Contact List and click on Design View.
And I could actually change the design of that contact list.
So let’s close the design of the contact list.
Bear in mind that what I’ve just said about those forms holds equally true, for example,
for reports.
So if you’ve created a report, perhaps a phonebook report like this one, if you wanted
to run that report you could.
If you wanted to change the design of that report you could.
And the same goes for queries and for macros and for tables.
And we’ll be looking at all of these as we go through the course.
Now one other very important factor here is that when you look at the top of the Ribbon
the Ribbon tabs, that’s Home, Create, External Data, etcetera, to the left of those there
is a File item.
And we’ve clicked on that file a few times already during the course.
And that’s different from Home and Create and the others because it isn’t really a
Ribbon tab.
It’s a button that takes you into what’s called Backstage View.
And we’ve also been into Backstage View quite a few times.
The name Backstage View was introduced when the Ribbon was introduced and nowadays it’s
often just referred to as Backstage, but I tend to still call it Backstage View.
And in Backstage View there are a number of options available.
There is by default an Info option.
We’ll be talking about that later on in the course.
There is a New option where we can create a new database.
We’ve used that already.
There’s an Open option.
We’ve used that already.
There’s a Save As.
We’ve used that already.
There is a Print option.
I think you can probably work out what that does but we’ll do a little bit of printing
later on.
There’s a Close option and then there are two others.
I’m going to ignore Feedback at the bottom.
If I click on Account it takes me through to information about the account that is currently
being used for this copy of Access 2016.
I’ve mentioned a couple of things about this already.
It’s currently running under one of my Office 365 accounts.
And I have two connected services.
I have OneDrive shared cloud storage and I have a service provided by SharePoint.
If you don’t have the correct services setup here or if you have other services that you
want to connect there is an Add a Service button here.
So for instance, if you have alternative cloud storage you can set it up here, including
the credentials you need to access it.
Very importantly over on the right here you have Office updates.
It’s very important that you make sure that you keep your Access 2016 up to date.
Now under normal circumstances it will be updated as part of your regular Windows updates,
but you do need to make sure that you’ve got it set correctly.
So there are options here such as Update Now if you think it might be out of date or you
want to check.
You can disable updates which is generally not a very good idea.
But sometimes people disable updates.
For example, if you’re going through a period of time when you don’t want the load on
your internet connection or the load on your system or you just don’t want the version
of Access you’re using updated for a while you can disable that for a while.
You can also look at the history of updates and you can learn more about updates here.
It’s very important that you keep your copy of Access 2016 up to date.
Something else that you may want to experiment with is the Office background and Office theme
when you’re using Access 2016.
You have a whole range of Office backgrounds here.
I use No Background because my prime concern here is that you can see clearly whatever
I’m doing.
So I keep the background as plain and as boring as I possibly can to make it easier for you
to see.
But by all means experiment with things like Circles and Stripes or Doodle Circles or Stars
or something.
I stick with No Background.
And for the Theme I’ve currently got Colorful.
I’m going to change that to White and that really will make everything as clean and clear
as possible.
So make sure you’re familiar with everything on the Account page.
Once it’s set correctly you’ll rarely need to revisit it.
But it is important to make sure that it is set correctly.
The last option on Backstage View that I’m going to look at is Options.
And if I click on Options it takes me into the Access Options dialog.
And this dialog is made up of a number of pages and each of them has some very important
settings which allow me to make my copy of Access work in exactly the way that I want
it to.
Now I’m going to tell you a lot more about Access Options in a section about half a dozen
sections from now.
And we will be accessing Access Options many times during the course.
So for the moment I’m just going to Cancel that and I’m just going to finally return
into Backstage View one more time, click on the File button at the top left there.
When you are in Backstage View to go back to whichever database you’re working on
you use that little left pointing arrow.
It looks like a browse or back button at the top left there.
That takes me back into my database.
And finally for those of you using touch don’t forget to make sure that you’re in touch
mode.
For the majority of us, including me, we’re going to be in mouse mode.
But other than that that’s the end of this section.
Please join me in the next one.