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.
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.
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 you can also Print reports… or view a Print Preview.
And to 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.
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.