Professor Futrelle's "new course" 11/7/2008

On Friday, November 7, 2008, Professor Futrelle introduced a "new Access course" to his section of CSU101. Rather than having you attempt to produce Access forms and reports from scratch, we'll do what millions of people do and work from predefined templates.

Link to the details of the lab assignment, LabRPF1 - Due 11/18/2008

Templates

The users of Access are not computer professionals. They simply want a database for their business, school, office, etc. For this reason, there are many predefined templates. These are out-of-the box comprehensive databases that may have a few dozen tables, forms, and reports. They only need to be modified to include the business particulars (name, address, phone, email, etc.) and the database itself filled by the user with information about particular customers, inventory, students, sales, etc.

So your tasks in this new portion of the course will be to do just the things that hundreds of thousands of users do - customize a template database. This can include rearranging layouts on the screen, hiding various fields, renaming items, adding descriptive text to guide the user, etc.

Tutorials

You don't have a textbook or course notes for CSU101, and for Access in particular. So here are links to a number of useful tutorials on the web that discuss both forms and reports. I hope these are helpful.

A form is an Access object - It generally serves three purposes:

• To allow users to perform data entry. Data can be inserted, updated, or deleted from a table using a Form object.
• To allow users to enter custom information, and based on that information perform a task. For example, you may want to ask a user for parameters before running a report.
• To allow users a method of navigating through the system. For example, you may create a form where a user can select a form to load, a report to run, etc.

A report is an Access object - It is used to display your data in an organized manner so that users can print it.

Links to the tutorials

1. Access Tutorial: Form Basics in Access 2007 (page 1 of 12)
2. Access Tutorial: Report Basics in Access 2003/XP/2000/97 (page 1 of 12)
3. Access Forms
4. Access Reports
5. MS Access 2007 - Reports
6. MS Access 2007 - Forms
7. Creating Forms in Microsoft Access
8. Microsoft Access Reports Tutorial
9. Form and Report Design Fundamentals

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