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When you open a Microsoft Access table, the datasheet view offers a quick, if basic, method of interacting with the data in your tables. One of several useful features offered by the datasheet is the ability to sort table data on any column. This means that you are always able to view your information in the most useful order, be it alphabetically, by date or by value.
To gain access to the sort commands, click on the pop-up menu on the right hand edge of any column heading and choose the appropriate option. The options displayed in the popup menu will depend on the type of data stored under that particular column. For text columns, the options will be “Sort A to Z” and “Sort Z to A”; for date fields, “Sort Oldest to Newest” and “Sort “Newest to Oldest; for numbers, “Sort Smallest to Largest” and “Sort Largest to Smallest”; and for Yes/No columns, “Sort Selected to Cleared ” and “Sort Cleared to Selected”.
Before you sort data, records are stored in the order in which they were created and, even after sorting, Access continues to store them in this order. However, for your convenience, it will display them in any sort order you specify. At any time, you can restore the underlying actual sort order by clicking on the Clear All Sorts button in the Sort & Filter group of the Home Tab of the Microsoft Access Ribbon.
Because of this potential discrepancy between the sort order as displayed and the actual order in which records are stored in the table, sorting is not dynamic. It is important to realize that sorting is an operation rather than a setting. In other words, if you add records to the table, they will not automatically be moved to the correct position to match the last sort that you performed. However, Access does remember the order in which records were last sorted and will restore that order each time you open a table’s datasheet.
You can sort on multiple fields. The trick for doing this is to perform the sorts in reverse order. Let’s say, for example, you have a contact table and you want to sort it first by Surname and then by First_Name, so that Amy Smith would be listed before John Smith. You would first perform a “Sort A to Z” on the First_Name column followed by a second “Sort A to Z” on the Surname column.
Becoming fluent in Microsoft Office Access can help your career. Need to master MS Access? We offer Microsoft Access 2007 tuition in London and all over the UK.
Tags: Computers, Internet, microsoft access, microsoft office, Software
Posted in Computers · April 26th, 2010 · Comments (0)
Prior to actually creating database tables in Microsoft Access, it is important that you fully analyse your data requirements and plan the structure of your database accordingly. You need to come up with a strategy for organizing your data which will provide you with the most efficient vehicles for both data input and retrieval. You must therefore have a clear idea of what data will be available for data input and the reports and information that you and your colleagues will want to extract. Armed with this knowledge, you can then begin to design your database. At this stage, you will not need to think about such matters as computer software; you need only concern yourself with the logical structure of your data.
When planning and designing your tables, you will need to identify every piece of data that will be important for your system. These units of information will eventually become fields within the tables, so it is important for you to identify the smallest units of information possible. This may take several passes: on the first pass you will identify chunks of information; and on subsequent passes, you will break them down into smaller, individual components.
One simple example is a person’s name. If you identify name as a single field, you will not have enough flexibility when you come to retrieve data. It will be preferable to break down the name field into title, first name and last name. Similarly, if you are storing an address, you will want to break it down into several key components, including town, district and postal code. You can then easily retrieve every client in a certain town or discover whether two clients are in the same building by comparing their postal code fields.
When you are actually creating your tables in Access, you should also address the question of data types. If you are to be able to retrieve data in a useful manner, each field that you design must be of the correct data type and have the appropriate size. Thus if you have a field called password, you will probably limit it to a maximum of, say, twenty characters; whereas a field like email address would be better off with a limit of, say, 150 to accommodate the longest possible email addresses.
It is also important to remember that Microsoft Access includes some useful features for automatic data entry into certain fields; so, it is also useful to try and identify those fields into which it might be useful to automatically enter a default value.
Getting to grips with Microsoft Office Access 2007 is a good move for any IT specialist. Looking to master MS Access 2007? We offer Microsoft Access training in London and all over the UK.
Tags: Databases, Internet, microsoft access, microsoft office, Software
Posted in Databases · April 24th, 2010 · Comments (0)