Microsoft Access 2013 Tutorials
Welcome / What Access Is
Subtitles of the Movie (Microsoft Access 2013 / Welcome / What Access Is)
Let's start the course off by answering a pretty basic, simple question. What is Access? Now keep in mind some folks are coming to this course brand new to Access. They're not, not really sure what it is, they have an idea and so let's help them get up to speed here. And then for those of you old timers who have been around you may want to skip this video, maybe even the next little group of videos where we're talking about Access, you know alternatives or the database 101 section where I go into just kind of some basics about databases. But this is specifically designed for those of you who are new to the whole database world and we welcome you with open arms. Okay. So big group hug here and let's talk about what's going on here at the most basic level. What is Access? Well according to Microsoft if you look on their website or at least when I looked it said that Access is a database tool for gathering and understanding your information. Your phone numbers, inventory, guest lists, whatever you're tracking and providing a convenient way to enter, navigate and report out your data. Now that's what Microsoft says. Well let me give it to you in some simplified non-marketing speak. Access is a database application tool. And you will use Access to build databases and then modify the data in those databases or modify the database itself. And then you can create reports from that data. Now keep in mind I haven't included here that Access will also build kind of the user interface front end that your end users will use to input, modify, look for data in the database. And so that's what Access is. It is a really neat total database solution. Now we'll talk about some limitations and some other options with Access a little bit later on in some different videos. So if you go that you're okay for now. Now when should you use Access? This is a big question I get from a lot of people in live environments and people who are new databases when should I consider using Access? Well whenever you need to collect and maintain data. And by that I mean more than just a few pieces of data. Okay. If you're keeping up with five names and addresses you could probably do that you know on a piece of paper in a text file. But if you've got you know 50, 60, 100 200,300, 5,000 names and addresses, then you probably need a database and Access would be a good choice for that. Whenever you need to provide secure, organized access, no pun intended to the data. So when you want to determine who can get to this data, exactly how this data is organized, Access is another solution. When multiple users need to query and modify the data, now this is when you really start to need a database. If you can put 50 names and addresses on a Word document and send it out, everybody prints it, sticks on their wall and everybody has it, that's pretty cool. But when any of those 50 people need to be able to go in and query and different pieces and parts of groups of that list and then modify that list, now you've got a challenge and Access can handle that. Whenever you need to create reports on the data. You want to pull just the people who have been here in the last six months. Or just the people who got extra special ratings on their last employee review, that sort of thing if you're tracking that data. When you need to explore what the data means. Sometimes we can find things out about our data when we look at trends in that data. And this is a big one, watch for this, I'll talk about this more later on in the course in a number of places. But when you won't have any more than about 20 to 30 users at the same time trying to use the database. If you've got more than that then Access is going to have a little bit of a problem and you probably need a more powerful solution, we'll talk about that later as well. Now watch the marketing here. If you look on Microsoft's website and all the little tables and tips, they'll tell you the maximum number of concurrent users with Access is 255. You know I guess it's a temperature of 72, there's rose petals fluttering around, little kittens are hopping around, there's happy music, you know. If everything's perfect maybe you can get 255 people at once to connect but it's going to be slow. Most people will tell you in the real world after about 20 to 30 users it starts to get slow. Now if you really apply some experience and some tricks to it you can, you know you can get on up there with users. I've seen a lot of people doing it but it really starts to wobble it's top heavy if you will. So anyway that's what Access is, that's when you should use it and so let's now move on and we'll talk about some of the things like what's new in Access and how Access is growing up and that sort of thing.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Microsoft Access 2013 |
| Author: | Mark Long |
| SKU: | 34405 |
| ISBN: | 978-1-61866-090-9 |
| Release Date: | 2013-02-01 |
| Duration: | 7 hrs / 89 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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