What Is Microsoft Access Used For?

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Dave Andrews. Today I'm going to show you what Microsoft Access is used for. Microsoft Access is Microsoft's office product that basically allows you to create databases, relational databases, which means you can have tables of data similar to what you would do in Excel except their stored in Access. You can have one table for, let's say, customers for your business, you can have another table over here for sales, and you can have fields in your sales table that redirect back to the customers table. That way you're able to actually tie a sale to a customer using records. And that's what a relational database is all about. There's a relation between your sales and your customers. Let's pull up Access. And this is an example here of an asset database that's been created in Access. As you can see, there's different tables here. This is basically assets, and then there are a few forms that have been created, such as assets by owner. The main table in this one is the asset list. As you can see over here, it looks a lot like Excel except we're able to type in information here. Let's say we have laptop computer and its category is, let's just go with the default, condition is great condition, its location is our Nashville office, and as you can see the data that I'm being, that I'm typing into here is actually pulling out of a sub table. Like I tried to type Nashville office and it said, "hey you can't do that. You have to use one of these three locations". So we'll select one of those, and the owner actually pulls from another table which I haven't populated, so I'm just going to type in myself. It tells me that item isn't in the list, so it gives me the option to edit the list. I'm just going to add in David Andrews as an option for that list. And then you can fill out the acquired date and put in attachments. Now what that is doing is it's dumping all of this data into tables that are inside the Access database and then I can go and run these reports such as asset details, which will pull up a report on my asset. As you can see, I have a laptop computer, and here's all the information I've typed in about that computer. So in a nutshell, Access allows you to type in information into tables, to tie those tables together and then to get meaningful reports for your business out of those tables. My name's Dave Andrews and I've just told you a little bit about what Access is used for."