Course Description
Course Details
Take control of your data! In this course, you'll learn how to harness the power of Microsoft Access 2016 to organize, store, edit, manage, and report on hundreds of thousands of records. You'll start with the basics of database concepts and structure, and learn to build and customize tables to store data. With that foundation in place, you'll then learn about relational databases, and see how you can use them to build forms, generate reports, and search for data with queries across thousands of records in hundreds of tables—often with just a few clicks of your mouse! You'll also discover how to use macros to automate repetitive tasks and increase your efficiency. Through easy-to-follow, step-by-step instructions, this course will help you master Access and put it to creative, confident use. You'll develop not only strong Access skills, but a solid understanding of good database design concepts. By the time you've finished the course, you'll know how to organize and assemble an effective database for any kind of information you need to store, document, and manage.
How It Works
This course is fully online, you require internet access and an email account. The course duration is 6 weeks, followed by a 2-week period to complete the final exam (online, open book). Lessons are released on Wednesdays and Fridays of each week, for a total of 12. You are not required to be online at any specific time. In addition to the specific lesson content, there is a discussion board with each lesson and often there is an optional assignment to apply the learning. Following each lesson, there is a short multiple choice quiz. Your score on these quizzes does not count towards the final mark but completing these helps solidify your learning as well as prepare you for the final exam. The final exam is an open-book, multiple choice exam and you need to achieve a minimum of 65% on the final exam to pass the course. There is only one opportunity to pass the exam. A certificate of completion from WatSPEED is available within four weeks of successful completion of each course and can be accessed in your student portal. Many of the Ed2Go courses are eligible towards the various online certificates offered by WatSPEED.
Requirements
Microsoft Access 2016 (software must be installed and fully operational before the course begins.)
Syllabus
Lesson 1 - Getting to Know Access 2016. In this lesson, you'll find out what Access is and how individuals, businesses, and organizations use it to store information. You'll begin to build an Access database . . . including all the components that turn a list of records into reports, forms, and queries. We'll start by opening the application and creating a new database.
Lesson 2 - Controlling Your Access Table Fields. It's time to lay down the law! Today you'll impose rules that automatically fill an Access table field with a preset value or that automatically insert the symbols commonly included in phone numbers. Also, you'll set up rules that require allow only certain kinds of data in certain fields. With just a few minutes of work, you can make data entry simpler, clearer, and practically error-free.
Lesson 3 - Creating Tables and Relationships. Today you'll create additional tables for our class base, customizing them along the way, and then build relationships between them. This all paves the way for later database features, such as reports, queries, and forms that draw from multiple tables in the database.
Lesson 4 - Building Powerful Forms. In this lesson, you'll use forms for data entry and for viewing records in your tables. You'll meet the Form Wizard, which makes form building fast and easy and which allows you to select one or more tables' fields to include. You'll also determine form layout.
Lesson 5 - Adding Versatility to Forms. In this lesson, you'll add buttons and controls to forms. You'll also adjust table relationships to support the creation of multi-table forms . . . which paves the way to creating queries and reports that draw data from more than one table.
Lesson 6 - Interviewing Your Database. Using queries to sort, filter, and search your database is one of the most important skills you'll master in this course. In this lesson, you'll create queries that search for specific data. You'll also customize how Access displays that data. You'll follow instructions step by step so you gain confidence with the process. Then I'll turn you loose to create a query on your own.
Lesson 7 - Taking Queries to the Next Level. A query that puts specific records in order or finds all the records that have a general piece of information in common is, well, pretty common. Being able to create that kind of query is a great foundation skill, but it won't help you find a very specific record. Nor will it let you search for records within a span of dates or other numeric values. It also won't help you exclude certain records, reducing a large pool of data to just those records you need to see. In this lesson, you'll create queries that give you true power to search your database.
Lesson 8 - Multi-Table Query Control. In this lesson, you'll learn to plan, build, and use queries that pull data from more than one table at a time. This gives you more power over your data and allows you to build a great foundation for truly customized reports.
Lesson 9 - Reporting on Your Tables. Reports are easy to create and to customize. In this lesson, you'll build a simple report using the Report Wizard. Then you'll change the report's appearance, using layout view and design view. These skills provide the foundation to create and design any report you may need on any data in your database.
Lesson 10 - Creating Query-Based Reports. In this lesson, you'll create reports that are based on the results of queries you create to sort and filter your database. Because queries can combine data from multiple tables, filter for specific data, and sort the results, your report reflects just the data that meet the query's criteria. This makes truly customized reporting possible, and quite simple.
Lesson 11 - Mastering Report Design. In this lesson, you'll plan and create a completely customized report, using a specialized query that controls which data the report includes. You'll add fields that perform calculations on your data. You'll customize your report's layout, too, using design view's many tools for controlling the structure and appearance of your data.
Lesson 12 - Automating Your Database With Macros. Building macros (short programs that perform a series of steps) helps you speed up and create consistency in your more repetitive Access tasks. From opening a form to running a report to building a new record in a table, macros eliminate redundant procedures by turning them into something you can do with one click.
