Chapter 9. Making Your Database Easy to Use


9. Making Your Database Easy to Use

Chapter at a Glance

In this chapter, you will learn to:

Create a switchboard.

Create custom categories.

Control the features available to database users.

Make favorite Access commands quickly available.


A Microsoft Office Access 2007 database is a complex combination of objects, information, and the tools required to manage and manipulate them. In the first eight chapters of this book, you learned how to work with these components to enter, organize, retrieve, and display information. You can create databases that you, or other people familiar with Access, can use.

However, if information will be entered and retrieved from your database by people who aren't proficient with Access, the information will be safer and the users happier if you take some steps to insulate them from the inner workings of Access. You need to turn your collection of objects and information into an application that organizes related tasks. Then users can focus on the job at hand, rather than on learning to use the program the database is running in.

With a little extra effort on your part, you can make it much easier for other people to access and manipulate your data, and much more difficult to unintentionally change or delete it. In previous versions of Access the most common ways to control access to a database application were through switchboards and startup options. Access 2007 has reduced support for switchboards and substantially changed the available startup options. Much of the functionality of switchboards is now available in custom groups, which are a new feature in Access 2007. However, the Switchboard Manager is still available for creating switchboards in Access 2007, and switchboards created in earlier versions of Access should for the most part still function correctly.

Troubleshooting

Some legacy features, such as start-up options and global add-in menus, are available only if you open the database as an Access 2003 MDB file, rather than converting it to the Access 2007 format.


In this chapter, you will learn how to create a simple switchboard, create custom groups, add a custom menu to the ribbon, and set various startup options.

See Also

Do you need only a quick refresher on the topics in this chapter? See the Quick Reference entries on pages xxxixlxv.


Important

Before you can use the practice files in this chapter, you need to install them from the book's companion CD to their default location. See "Using the Book's CD" on page xxv for more information.


Troubleshooting

Graphics and operating systemrelated instructions in this book reflect the Windows Vista user interface. If your computer is running Microsoft Windows XP and you experience trouble following the instructions as written, please refer to the "Information for Readers Running Windows XP" section at the beginning of this book.




MicrosoftR Office AccessT 2007 Step by Step
MicrosoftR Office AccessT 2007 Step by Step
ISBN: N/A
EAN: N/A
Year: 2004
Pages: 127

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