Summary

This hour showed you how to narrow your data and form subsets. Often, a table contains many more fields and records than you want to work with at any one time. Access's filter and query powers enable you to create subsets of data to make your work more manageable.

Filters provide quick subsets, but queries provide more power and flexibility. After you run a filter or query to create a subset of your data, you can make changes to the subset and modify data in the underlying tables. Although the Query Design view takes some getting used to, it enables you to specify powerful query extraction criteria so that Access searches for and finds the data with which you need to work.

Now that you can produce subsets of data, you need a way to report that data. The next hour, "Reporting with Access 2003," explores some of the reporting capabilities. The Report Wizard makes quick work of report generation from your tables and queries.