Hands-On Microsoft Access: A Practical Guide to Improving Your Access Skills

Creating Access Tables

Let's turn now to the specifics of creating Access tables for storing your data. Basically five ways exist for creating a new Access table:

• Use the Table Wizard

• Enter data directly into a datasheet

• Import data or link to an external source

• Use a Make Table query

• Build the table in Design view

I will focus on the last choice of starting from scratch in Design view, which is usually preferred. Importing and linking are discussed in Chapter 13, “Importing and Exporting,” and make-table queries are described in Chapter 9, “Queries, Part II.” That leaves using the Table Wizard and entering data into a datasheet, both of which I quickly dispose of now.

Table Wizard

The Table Wizard is of some use, but not for its intended purpose ...