Chapter 4. Working with Tables and Fields

CHAPTER TASK: MODIFY A TABLE'S FIELDS AND JOIN TWO RELATED TABLES

Prerequisites

• How to use menus, toolbars, dialog boxes, and shortcut keystrokes.

• How to open and modify database objects.

• How to add and edit database records.

Tables are by far the most important part of any database. Tables are where a database stores all of its information. All the other database objectsqueries, forms, reports, pages, and macrosare merely tools to analyze, manipulate, and display the information stored in a table. Any of these other database objects are optionalbut without tables, a database wouldn't be a database.

If you are interested in creating your own databases, this may be one of the most important chapters in the entire book. Why? Because, at their heart, the most useful and efficient databases use well-structured tables to store their information.

This chapter explains just about everything you will ever need to know about tables and fields: how to link two or more related tables, how to create indexes for faster performance, and how to create a primary key field, which uniquely identifies each record in a table. This chapter also explains how to change all the properties and settings for your tables' fields, such as how they are formatted and what kind of information they can store.