Access® 2007 For Dummies®

Part IV. Ask Your Data, and Ye Shall Receive Answers

In this part . . .

Data isn't very useful if you can't get at it – if you can't look for the one record you need and actually find it quickly and easily. Why would you spend hours building tables and entering data into them if you weren't going to be able to use it?

Part IV is all about the return on your database‐building investment – getting the information you need out of the data you're storing. You'll find out about putting your records in a particular order and then distilling them down to just the one or two that you need to see. You'll also discover cool ways to ask your tables questions, the database version of playing “Go Fish”. Instead of saying “Gimme all your eights”, however, you'll be saying, “Show me everyone who lives in Idaho” or “Gimme all the gizmos that cost more than $5.00 but don't come from the Chicago warehouse.”

All the various ways Access provides for getting at your data, from the painfully simple to the dazzlingly powerful, are covered here.