Datasheet

Book IV
Chapter 1
Publishing Access
Applications
613
Okay, we’re not talking furniture here (but you knew that). In Access, a table
is a database object that stores information about an entity. For example, an
Employee table may store information relating to all the employees in your
company. A table is a grid made up of fields — not grassy places for playing
ball or growing corn, but smaller database objects that hold specific pieces
of data — arranged in rows that represent the items that the fields describe.
For example, an Employee table may contain multiple fields describing an
employee — such as First Name, Last Name, Job Title, and Employee ID —
and one row (containing all these fields) corresponds to one employee.
Fields are also commonly referred to as attributes or columns (because each
one occurs at the same place in every row, and so stacks up as a column).
Rows are also called records or (if you’re being vague) items. At least one
field in the table is used to uniquely identify an item or row. In our example,
this unique field may be the Employee ID. For search purposes, this unique
field is also known as the primary key.
Most database applications contain multiple tables, many of which have a
relationship. For example, you may have a Jobs table that contains a list of
all the jobs within your organization, including such information as the Job
Title, Job Description, Job Classification, and Salary Range. The Employee
table would contain a Job Title field that would retrieve the list of possible
jobs from the Job table. In this case the Job Title field would be a lookup
field with a relationship to the Jobs table.
Microsoft Access provides an intuitive designer to help you through the
process of creating your database tables, and their associated fields and
relationships.
Forms
When you create an application that requires users to enter data, you invari-
ably need to create a form. The Forms Ribbon group, shown in Figure 1-3,
provides a number of commands from which you can create your Web data-
base forms.
Figure 1-3:
You can
create many
different
form types
in your Web
database.
Designing SharePoint-Compatible Access Databases
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