Goodwill Community Foundation creating
opportunities for a better life
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 while 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 near the upper left corner you'll
see 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
also print reports or view a print
preview and get out of backstage view
you can just click here 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
the 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 and 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 and 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
setup 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