Access

Many of the projects in this website make use of MS Access and indirectly MS Jet. You should note that there are reserved words in Access. There are circumstances where if you have used a reserved word as a field name conflicts can arise. Some of the sample projects here do use such reserved words (e.g. 'password' and 'user'). Take care with your choice of field names. See here and here for lists of reserved words in Access and Jet.

As with other Access projects in Simply Interactive a certain amount of knowledge about Access assumed. These are not introductory projects but with a basic understanding in place many new ideas and techniques can be gained through these projects, though some of them are not easy. All of them involve some degree of patience.

It is likely that only the ICT specialist or the diligent enthusiast would want to do these projects.

Some key concepts and techniques that you need to know something about are:

·     Bound vs. unbound forms and controls

• Using sub-forms
• Referencing form objects and properties
• Setting properties for forms and controls
• Queries and parameter queries
• Command buttons
• Some familiarity with the macro editor to create and edit action macros
• Using conditionals in macros
• Using macros as sub-routines.
• Setting Access start up options.

Don’t forget that Access Help provides substantial and useful information about all these topics.