Introduction

Once you've created a database, you'll want to be able to manage the records and information within that database. Microsoft Office Access 2003 gives you numerous ways to manage the records and information stored within the database.

Some of the techniques you might utilize to manage your databases could include sorting records in either ascending or descending order based on the contents of a specific field and filtering certain records out of a database for a special mailing to certain clients .

Other techniques include creating queries to help you retrieve specific information about particular customers. A query is a description of the records you want to retrieve from a database. As the name implies, a query helps answer specific questions about the information in your database, for example, "Which customers have placed orders in the last six months?" or "Who sent us greeting cards over the holidays in the last two years ?" The description of the records you want to retrieve identifies the names of the fields and the values they should contain; this description is called the selection criteria. With a query you can do the following:

• Focus on only the information you need by displaying only a few fields from a large table.

• Apply functions and other expressions to fields to arrive at calculated results.

• Summarize and group values from one table and display the result in another table.

• Retrieve information stored in multiple tables, even if the tables are not open .