My new series of YouTube videos is an introduction to Microsoft Access for absolute beginners who have never used Access before. If you are in the position of needing to learn Access fast or are curious about what you can do with Microsoft’s desktop database software, this series will provide you with a great introduction to organization of data into related tables, creating user-friendly data entry forms and designing reports to present your data as needed. The idea behind this series is to demonstrate Microsoft Access by showing the design of a new database application from start to finish. This includes the occasional mistakes and bugs that happen from time…

One of the fundamental differences between an Excel spreadsheet and a Microsoft Access or SQL Server database is the database’s ability to group data by subject into tables and create links between that information.  This type of organization enables the user to store large amounts of data and retrieve specific information quickly by writing queries that will search on the various fields. Referential Integrity is actually a simple but essential concept to understanding how databases like Access or SQL Server work.  Once you understand it, you will be able to use these tools to better organize and report on your data. To demonstrate this concept, I’m going to use a few tables…