What does Microsoft Access actually do?

Question

All I know is that it’s a “database management system”, and I don’t even know what that means! I have tried fooling around with Access and have gotten nowhere. Where do I start and what is the purpose of this?

In: 4

Answer 1

If youre familiar with spreadsheets, its essentially a spreadsheet like Excel. Whereas a spreadsheet is most often used to work with the data on the sheet youre looking at, Access is meant to look at all of your spreadsheets at the same time.

It does this via allowing you to build a user interface on top of it where you might enter your name, address, and phone number on one screen and hit “submit” and it sends it to the appropriate spreadsheets that store this info (names, addresses, and phone numbers). In a database, the spreadsheet is called a table instead of a sheet.

Now, you can go to your addresses table and look at all the address information youve collected and its just addresses, nice and clean. You can perform searches and say “show me all the people with the name of Kevin [from the names table] that live in New York [from the addresses table]”.

The way they link the names to the addresses is via a unique identifier called a “key”. When you are submitting your information, you may have had to register your username first. It then gives you an ID such as UID0000123. When you submit the data into, and into its subsequent tables, all records (entries) are stamped with that. So next time you search for your stuff, the system is actually just querying all things that match your user ID. That way, you don’t store all of the information over and over again throughout the tables to try to give enough identifying information to make a match. You just store the ID with each piece of data you tuck away.

In the business world, this is what people do to manage their business processes. An example might be a group that receives 450 invoices from various sources. Instead of opening them all in Excel and then trying to add all the tabs in the worksheets together, all of the excel documents are imported into Access as rows of data in the tables and they create a report that automatically adds it all up for them and creates a single summary file on the other side. Takes 5 minutes to do in Access, would have taken hours in Excel.