Special Edition Using Microsoft® Office XP

Planning an Access Database

Of all the Office applications, Microsoft Access is by far the most demanding and conceptually challenging. Anyone who's ever composed an interoffice memo or put together a budget can relate to Word and Excel instantly; an Access database, on the other hand, is made up of many individual objects, each of which must be built individually. With a wizard's help, it's possible to put together a simple database application in a relatively short time—to handle everything from tracking the contents of a wine cellar to managing inventory. Access applications can also scale up to enormous sizes, serving the information needs of large organizations and acting as a front end to data stored on mainframes and other network databases. ...