Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Creating databases and tables manually
Suppose you need to store different types of information for different types of people. For
example, you might want to maintain information about employees, customers, and suppli-
ers. In addition to the standard information—such as names, addresses, and phone num-
bers—you might want to track these other kinds of information:
▪
Employee identification numbers, hire dates, marital status, deductions, and pay rates
▪
Customer orders and account status
▪
Supplier contacts, current order status, and discounts
You could start with a template, add fields for all the different items of information to
a single Contacts table, and then fill in only the relevant fields for each type of contact.
However, cramming all this information into one table would soon get messy. It's better
to create a new database based on the Blank Desktop Database template and then man-
ually create separate tables for each type of contact: employee, customer, and supplier.
When you create a new blank database or insert a new table into an existing database, the
table is displayed on a tabbed page in Datasheet view with one empty row that is ready to
receive data.
TIP
When you create a new database, Access displays its name and a path to its storage
location in the title bar. For information about how to reduce the clutter caused by the
path, see “Controlling which features are available” in Chapter 11, “Make databases user
friendly.”
