A new section of each course starts monthly. If enrolling in a series of two or
more courses, please be sure to space the start date for each course at least two
months apart.
All courses run for six weeks, with a two-week grace period at the end. Two lessons
are released each week for the six-week duration of the course. You do not have
to be present when lessons are released. You will have access to all lessons until
the course ends. However, the interactive discussion area that accompanies each
lesson will automatically close two weeks after the lesson is released. As such,
we strongly recommend that you complete each lesson within two weeks of its release.
The final exam will be released on the same day as the last lesson. Once the final
exam has been released, you will have two weeks to complete all of your course work,
including the final exam.
Week One
Wednesday - Lesson 01
A database is a collection of data organized into multiple tables. In this lesson, you'll learn the importance of recognizing one-to-many relationships among the data your database will manage. You'll also discover how to create tables that reflect those relationships and create the first table for a sample working database that we'll build together throughout the course.
Friday - Lesson 02
Today, we'll dig deeper into database design and the natural one-to-many and many-to-many relationships among your data. You'll discover the importance of primary, foreign, and composite keys, and how to create them in your own databases. You'll get plenty of hands-on practice as we create more tables for our working sample database.
Week Two
Wednesday - Lesson 03
While tables provide a means of storing data, they don't offer much in the way of making a database user-friendly. For that, you need forms. In this lesson, you'll create a form for our working database and learn about the three ways to view forms: Form View, Layout View, and Design View. You'll start learning the tools and techniques the pros use to create attractive forms that are easy to use.
Friday - Lesson 04
Today's lesson will expand on the skills you learned in Lesson 3. Here you'll learn to move, size, and position multiple controls, choose colors and fonts, and more. You'll also find out how to test your forms and fix common problems. All of these skills will allow you to produce more professional-looking forms that make it easy to work with data in your database.
Week Three
Wednesday - Lesson 05
Today, we'll return to the topics of one-to-many and many-to-many relationships among tables and explore how they relate to forms. You'll build on the skills you've already acquired to create more complex one-to-many forms that reflect the one-to-many relationships among your data. You'll also discover the value of lookup queries and combo boxes, which make it easy for users for select data for fields without having to type it in from memory.
Friday - Lesson 06
Virtually everything you create in Access is an object, and all objects have properties. Understanding that is key to successful database design and development. In this lesson, you'll discover what that's all about and see how you can use properties to gain more control over every aspect of your database. Along the way, you'll add more enhancements to our working database, making your forms more attractive, usable, and user-friendly.
Week Four
Wednesday - Lesson 07
Sorting and Searching are key ingredients of any database. Today, we'll cover new techniques for sorting form data without the complexities of creating queries. You'll give your form a Search Box that allows users to quickly locate data without the need for complex filters or queries. As an added bonus, you'll learn how to create links in a table for sending e-mail messages with a simple mouse click. And you'll find out some of the secrets of SQL, the Structured Query Language that makes all your queries work the way they do.
Friday - Lesson 08
Storing text and numbers in a database is easy. But what if you want to also store pictures, Word documents, or other external files? You can do that too, thanks to the Attachment data type. In this lesson, you'll learn all about attachments, including ways to use them in forms.
Week Five
Wednesday - Lesson 09
Forms are great for interacting with data on a computer screen, but sometimes you have to print data on paper, too. That's where reports come in. In today's lesson, you'll learn the tools and techniques for creating and formatting reports. You'll see how to control margins, spacing, page breaks, page orientation, and other important formatting features. And you'll get plenty of hands-on practice in using the report Layout View and Design View.
Friday - Lesson 10
Today, we'll keep working on the skills you learned in Lesson 9, creating a more complex one-to-many report. You'll see how to use a query to combine data from multiple tables, and you'll learn about calculated controls on reports. You'll also discover some important skills for showing subtotals and totals on your one-to-many forms.
Week Six
Wednesday - Lesson 11
By now, you've created many database objects. Eventually, you may have to hand that database over to less knowledgeable users who won't know what to do with all those tables, queries, forms, and reports. Fortunately, they don't need to. As you'll discover in this lesson, you can hide all the complexities from those users. You'll learn to create a switchboard form that's so easy to use, your database users won't need any database expertise at all!
Friday - Lesson 12
In this, our final lesson, you'll discover still more tools and techniques for making your database more user-friendly. The star of this lesson will be Access macros, which pre-define actions that you can tie to a button click or other event to simplify things for your database users. You'll also learn how to create custom messages that explain things to users so you don't have to. You'll come away with a fully functional database that's easy enough for even a computer novice to operate.