Access 2010: The Missing Manual

Datasheet Navigation

In Chapter 1, you learned the basics of moving around the datasheet. Using your mouse and a few select keystrokes, you can cover a lot of ground. (Refer back to Datasheet shortcut keys for a review of the different keys you can use to jump from place to place and perform edits.)

However, you haven’t seen a few tricks yet. One is the timesaving record navigation buttons at the bottom of the datasheet (Figure 3-7).

Figure 3-7. You could easily overlook the navigation buttons at the bottom of the datasheet. These buttons let you jump to the beginning and end of the table, or, more interestingly, head straight to a record at a specific position. To do this, type the record number (like “4”) into the box (where it says “3 of 6” in this example), and then hit Enter. Of course, this trick works only if you have an approximate idea of where in the list your record is positioned.

Several more datasheet features help you orient yourself when dealing with large amounts of data, including sorting (which orders the records so you can see what you want), filtering (which cuts down the data display to include only the records you’re interested in), and searching (which digs specific records out of an avalanche of data). You’ll try out all these features in the following sections.

Sorting

In some cases, you can most easily make sense of a lot of data by putting it ...