The Garden Company’s database, which is called GardenCo, contains information about its employees, products, suppliers, and customers that is stored in a series of tables. As you complete the exercises in this book, you will work with these tables to develop an assortment of queries, forms, reports, data access pages, macros, and modules that can be used to enter, edit, and manipulate the information in the tables in many ways.
In this exercise, you will open the GardenCo database, explore some of its objects, and then close the database. You won’t find a lot of detailed explanation here, because this is just an overview.
BE SURE TO start your computer, but don’t start Access yet.
USE the GardenCo database in the practice file folder for this topic. This practice file is located in the My DocumentsMicrosoft PressAccess 2003 SBSKnowAccessOpen folder and can also be accessed by clicking Start/All Programs/Microsoft Press/Access 2003 Step by Step.
On the taskbar, click the Start button, point to All Programs and then Microsoft Office, and click Microsoft Office Access 2003.
As with other Office programs, Access has a menu bar and one or more toolbars across the top of the window. When you click either New or File Search on the File menu, or click Office Clipboard on the Edit menu, the New File task pane is displayed at the right side of this window.
On the toolbar, click the Open button, navigate to the My DocumentsMicrosoft PressAccess 2003 SBSKnowAccessOpen folder, and then double-click GardenCo. If Access warns you that unsafe expressions are not blocked, click Yes. Then click Open.
The Garden Company introductory screen, called a splash screen, appears.
Tip
There are a couple of other ways you can open a database. On the File menu, you can click New to display the New File task pane, which offers a variety of options for opening new or existing databases. You can also double-click a database in Windows Explorer, or My Documents, My Computer or My Network Places. (Access databases have a file name extension .mdb.)
Select the Don’t show this screen again check box, and then click OK.
The database’s switchboard appears. A switchboard is used to easily access the database objects needed to perform common tasks.
Click Close Switchboard to close the switchboard.
The GardenCo database window appears.
See Also
For more information about switchboards, see "Creating a Switchboard by Using Switchboard Manager" in Chapter 8.
Across the top of the window is a toolbar and along the left edge is the Objects bar, which lists the Access database objects. Because Tables is selected, the right pane of the window lists the tables contained in the database.
On the File menu, click Close to close the GardenCo database.
