Microsoft® Access® 2010 24-Hour Trainer

21

Creating Queries with the Wizard

The query is the workhorse of a database, and without queries to retrieve the data from tables, every search for a specific record would be a manual walk through the records in a table. Queries are formed from SQL (Structured Query Language) statements, which are a kind of programming language for data manipulation in standardized database systems, which Access understands. Select queries can be used to gather data from multiple tables and join the related fields to form the data into a structure that is useful for the task at hand. Action queries, such as Add, Update, and Delete, can be used to modify the table data directly. Select queries are often used in Access to gather, structure, and sort data into certain formats for presentation, allowing the developer to use those queries for the Record Source properties of Form or Report objects. And learning how to create really good queries will make building Access database applications much easier and more efficient!

Becoming proficient in the creation of queries is essential to an Access database developer, but they can be extremely complex and often difficult, even for advanced Access developers. Because queries are such a complex feature of the product, Access provides several tools for building and working with Query database objects. The Access Query Wizard, Query Design View, and the SQL View are all designers that Access provides for building Query objects in Access 2010. Because this is ...