Before you jump into Access, it's important to
familiarize yourself with the interface
so that you know where everything is.
And we're just going to take a quick tour of the
different areas of the screen
that you'll be working with.
Near the top of the window is a large toolbar area, and this is called the Ribbon.
The Ribbon is a collection of most of the tools
that you'll need to use in Access,
and it's divided into different tabs.
Just above the Ribbon is another toolbar, called
the Quick Access Toolbar.
Here, you can Save the current object,
and you also have the Undo and Redo commands,
and you can click the drop-down arrow to add more commands to it if you like.
On the left side of the screen, there is an area
called the Navigation pane.
This contains a list of all of the objects contained in your database.
All of the objects that are currently open will
appear on the Document Tabs bar.
And you'll use this to select which object you
want to view or edit.
At the bottom of the screen, you can use the Record Navigation bar
to navigate through the different records one at a time.
And to the right of that is the record search box,
which you can use to search for a specific record.
Now let's go back to the Ribbon and look at it in
a little more detail.
The Ribbon is designed to make things easy to
find, so each tab is divided into groups.
For example, here in the Forms group, we have several different commands for working with
forms.
When you're working on a database, you may notice
that there are some
extra tabs that appear on the Ribbon with a label above them,
and these will just appear automatically depending on what you're working on.
In this case, we have a table open, so it opened
up a couple of tabs to help us work with tables.
If you want to hide the Ribbon, you can click this
little arrow in the top-right corner.
But we're going to be working with the Ribbon a
lot, so you may want to leave it visible.
If you're familiar with Office 2007, you may notice that the Office Button is gone,
and it has been replaced with the File tab.
If you click on it, you'll go to Backstage view,
and this is where you'll find the Save options,
and you can open your databases from here.
And you can also print reports or view a Print Preview.
And to get out of Backstage view, you can just
click any tab on the Ribbon.
When you start working with databases,
you'll use the Navigation pane to open and manage your objects.
By default, it sorts all of the objects by type.
If you want to sort them a different way, you can
click this bar at the top of the Navigation pane,
and then choose which sort method you want.
You can resize the Navigation pane by dragging the
right border.
And you can minimize it by clicking the double-arrow in the upper-right-hand corner.
You can also hide the groups that you're not working on
by clicking the bar at the top of each group.
For example, I can hide Categories, Products Table, and Sales Unit,
so I can just focus on Customers and Menu Items.
Database designers will often set up a special kind of form called a navigation form.
This will appear automatically when you open the
database.
Instead of using the Navigation pane and the Document Tabs bar to navigate through different
objects, you'll use tabs within the navigation form.
This gives you a much more user-friendly way to
work with the database.
For example, the employees at this bakery only
need to work with
the Orders, Customers, and Menu Items.
They can easily get to these by using the tabs,
and some of the tabs will also have sub-tabs on the right.
By using the navigation form, we can just focus on
the objects that we need,
without having to worry about all of the other objects in the database.
It's a great feature, but again, it's something that needs to be set up before you can use
it.
So those are the basics of how to get around in Access,
and in the next video we're going to talk about how to open and save databases and objects.