Microsoft
Office
Specialis
Creating a New Database
2
Creating Tables the Simple Way
Microsoft
When you use the Database Wizard to create a contact management database, the
Office
Specialist
t
database has all the
components
needed to store basic information about people.
But suppose The Garden Company needs to store different types of information for
different types of contacts. For example, it might want to maintain different types
of information about employees, customers, and suppliers. In addition to the stan
dard information—such as names, addresses, and phone numbers—the company
might want to track these other kinds of information:
¦
Employee Social Security number, date of hire, marital status, deductions,
and pay rate
¦
Customer order and account status
¦
Supplier contact, current order status, and discounts
While building the database, you could add a lot of extra fields to the Contacts table
and then fill in just the ones it needs for each contact type, but cramming all this infor
mation into one table would soon get pretty messy. It’s better to create a database with
one table for each contact type: employee, customer, and supplier.
The Database Wizard doesn’t offer exactly this combination of tables, so in this
exercise, you will create a GardenCo database with an empty structure. You will
then add several tables to the database by using the Table Wizard.
1
On the toolbar, click the New button to display the New File task pane.
New
2
In the New area of the New File task pane, click Blank database.
3
Navigate to the My Documents\Microsoft Press\Access 2003 SBS\CreateNew
\CreateGrdn folder, in the File name box, replace db1 with
GardenCo
, and then
click Create.
Access displays a database window that contains no tables, queries, forms,
or other database objects. (You can confirm that the database is empty by clicking
each of the object types on the Objects bar.)
4
On the database window’s toolbar, click the New button to display the New Table
dialog box.
Tip
Instead of clicking the New button, on the Database toolbar, you can click
the down arrow to the right of the New Object button, and then click Table; or you can
click Tables on the Objects bar, and then double-click “Create table by using wizard";
or you can click Table on the Insert menu, and then double-click Table Wizard.
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