Key Points

• Microsoft Office Access 2003 provides a variety of tools you can use to organize the display of information in a database and to locate specific items of information, making it easy to search through and find information in your database, even as it grows in size and complexity.

• You can sort through a table in either ascending or descending order, based on the values in any field (or combination of fields). In Access, numbers can be treated as text or numerals.

• You can filter a table so that information containing some combination of characters is displayed (or excluded from the display). You can apply simple filters while viewing information in a table or a form. These filters are applied to the contents of a selected field, but you can apply another filter to the results of the first one to further refine your search.

• You can use the Filter By Form command to filter a table or form based on the information in several fields. Since defining a filter is often easier in a form and viewing the results is easier in a table, you can use AutoForm to quickly create a form for a table. You can use the form with Filter By Form, and then switch to Datasheet view to see the results.

• When you need to search a single table for records that meet multiple criteria or that require complex expressions as criteria, you can use the Advanced Filter/Sort command.

• You can create queries to display specific fields from specific records from one or more tables, even designing the query to perform calculations for you. You can then save your queries for later use.