In Microsoft Access 2010, the building block of the database is a table. This is where all the information relating to your database will be stored. As you work with a relational database like MS Access, you will have a number of tables, each of which contain info on a particular subject. After a database is designed, it becomes quite cumbersome to modify existing table design and fields. As such, you should pay attention in the beginning when you are designing your database, queries, tables, forms and reports.



Database design consideration

There are a number of considerations to keep in mind when creating an Access 2010 database, here are some of the important ones.

  1. What type of information is going to be stored into the database?  This data will ultimately become the new tables in MS Access. For example if you are creating a hospital database, you could have tables like doctors, patients, procedures etc.
  2. How will the data be entered into Microsoft 2010 Access database? A good place to start is to use any kind of existing forms (paper or electronic) that are currently being used to gather the data. These items will become Input Forms in Access Microsoft database.
  3. What is the data output from the database going to look like? These usually translate into Output Reports which Access 2010 is also capable of generating.

Keeping these things in mind, let us go ahead and create an Access 2010 database with Employee information in it. If you have Microsoft Access 2010 installed already, you can go ahead and launch it by doing the following. If not you should be able to download it from this Microsoft site. todo

Start > Programs > Microsoft Office > Microsoft Access 2010

This will launch the MS Access 2010 application. In order to create a new database in MS Office Access , take the following steps:

File Menu > New > Blank database

Enter the name of the access database under File Name and click on Create button. We used “Employee” as the database name. Here is what the screen shot looks like on our computer.

how-to-create-access-db

 

After that, Access will create a new table named Table1 as a starting point. This is shown in the figure below. Notice under All Access Object, you can see Table1. Let us go ahead and create the table using Design View. In order to invoke this view, you need to right click on the table and select Design View.

access-2010-databsae-table

 

When we did that, we received a dialog box titled Save As. We entered the name of Access 2010 table as Employee and clicked OK. Next we were given the opportunity to enter Field Name and Data Type information. We entered EmployeeID for field and AutoNumber for data type.

Here is the screenshot on this step.

what-is-microsoft-access



Cheap car insurance

 

Notice you have additional field properties in the bottom left pane. We enter additional table fields like LastName, FirstName, DOB etc. Under the Data Type column you will get a drop down where you can select the proper data type for the field. As an example for field DateHired, we select Date/Time field shown in the screen capture from our monitor.

 

how-to-create-access-table

 

Next we would like to enter data into the MS 2010 Access table. You can do that by selecting:

View > Datasheet View.

When we did that, it asked us to save the table. We clicked on Yes. It takes us to the Data Editing view which looks like a spreadsheet. We enter the information for two records. The following screenshot shows the data in our table.




 

add-data-to-ms-access-2010

 

After you enter all the data, you can close the table by clicking on x in the upper right corner. When you do that you will see a dialog box. Go ahead and click on Yes. At this point you have created a database, created a table and entered some Employee data. Under All Access Objects, you can see the table Employee.

Here is the screen shot looks like on our machine.

 

how-to-use-access-database

 

This completes the post on How to create database in MS Access 2010. If you would want to learn more about Microsoft Access, please visit our Microsoft Access 2010 tutorial page.

Related links on MS Access 2010

How to create a database in Microsoft Access – eHow.com

Learn MS Access with a FREE 7-day free trial to lynda.com.

Video on how to design and create a database table – YouTube

Steps on how to create a database in Access – Microsoft.com

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