Lab 1: Introduction to Microsoft Access

Objective By the end of this lab, you should be familiar with

• Some basic features of MS Access, including tables, queries, forms, and reports • Standard terminology

Microsoft Access In this lab, we will be implementing the theories on database design that we learned in class with a commercial Relational Database Management System called Microsoft Access (MSA). The program comes with the standard Microsoft Office install, but should you wish to purchase it separately you might be able to get a good deal at the student store: http://calcomputers.berkeley.edu/ If you have a laptop, we encourage you to install MSA on your computer and bring it to the lab sessions, since we don’t have enough computers to accommodate every student individually. If you do not have a copy of MSA on your home PC, you can launch it on any of the lab machines by selecting Start à All Programs à Microsoft Office à Microsoft Office Access 2007. To use the lab machines, you will need to set up an account with the IEOR department; please see Jay Sparks on the fourth floor for details on this procedure. Most of the information provided in this lab can be accessed in greater detail under Microsoft Access’s extensive help files. All the information provided in this tutorial is based on MS Access 2007 unless otherwise specified. If you have a different version installed on your machine, you should expect to see some minor differences between what is described here and what you observe on your screen.

What is a database?

Features of a database Tables A table allows the user to store a collection of data about a specific topic, such as Customers or Orders

Queries Queries allow the user to view, change, and analyze data in different ways, such as combining data from two different tables (Customers and Orders), in order to create a custom view (e.g. London orders placed in April). They may also be used as the source of records for forms, reports, and data access pages.

Forms Forms allow users to enter, change, or update data.

Reports Now that you have all of your data stored in a database, you need to have a way to view it; this is where reports come in handy.

Terminology It is important to note that MS Access sometimes uses different terms from those we use in class and the textbook. The following is a summary of such terms and how they should be interpreted:

MS Access Lecture/Text Table (Lab 3) Relation (Ch. 5) Column/Field (Lab 3) Attribute (Ch. 3) Row/Record (Lab 3) Tuple (Ch. 5) Relationship View1

(Lab 4) Lines indicate foreign keys (Ch. 7)

1 Note that the Relationship View in MS Access looks similar to but is different from the ER Diagram.