1. Introduction (Programming in Microsoft Access 2013) 🎓

hello everybody my name is Steve Bishop and I'm going to start doing a series in programming in Access 2013 I have been a developer of access for only about just a little over a year but I have worked on some very large projects and I think you could definitely learn from what my experience has been because I think for people who are especially starting out you'll run into pitfalls you'll start running into problems running into issues and those are the same types of things that I've had to learn I've had no formal training in developing access I just I literally learned straight off of what was on the internet and available to me through watching video series like this one and I figured I'd give back to the community a little bit by making my own especially because I think I run into some of the same pitfalls that most people do and I'm sure during this process of of going through the programming in Access 2013 series I will run into some of those pitfalls and you'll see me encounter them and you'll learn how I overcome them and kind of how you sometimes I have to backtrack or modify how you planned on doing something in order to make it work the way that you originally intended so let's go ahead and get started here so what is access some of you may already know some of this may be old news but a lot of people may not really know what access is well access is essentially a relational database system with rapid rapid development basically his or rad and with access it makes it very very easy to develop both a way of maintaining your data if you were a large business or a small business you just wanted to say keep track of sales or customers or you know a client list of some sorts access is really good for that it allows you to develop interface for your for yourself so you can enter in data into these objects in the background called tables which we'll get to in just a little bit it's a way of organizing your data and making an application for yourself very quickly and easily to get to that data and put it in so why should you use XS well you should probably be using access if you're looking for something that's going to be a very quick way to design and develop your data and organize it with easy access you can print reports you can you know you can do just about anything in access with your data which makes it a very very wonderful application for you to learn and if your plant it's it's a good jumping start to if you're planning on getting into some of the more developed programming languages knowing how to organize your data and develop forms create reports etc is going to be very helpful for you in the future if you plan on going into the dotnet framework so who uses access well access can be used by mostly I would say with smaller businesses or single person just trying to organize their data you know keep track of certain financial things or keeping track of client lists etc so if you're in the if you're interested in trying to organize your data keep track you know manage your clients you can you know print invoices that sort of thing that's really probably the primary example but really access can be useful for just about every situation in Scenario you don't even have to use the data the data tables itself you could just have a simple form that has object-oriented programming which we will get into a little bit later and I'm probably using some big terms but access is really exciting because it integrates so many of those wonderful useful features that you will find in other programming languages so do you need any necessary skills getting up to access well hopefully you understand English well enough because that's the language I speak I don't honestly speak any other languages you need to be able to have some pretty good logical skills in and this is no I'm not trying to put down anybody but there are certain people that just may not be able to catch on to what access is about or programming in general and it's it may just take some time for those people to get used to it but I know that there are people in here that would just the moment they start thinking about organizing my data Visual Basic oh my gosh I don't really want to get into that they get overwhelmed and they don't really want to do it but other than that I mean as long as you have access on your computer which comes with office professional or home and business as long as you have that on your computer that's really all you need you don't need to have any at least for this particular course I'm going to try to walk you through as best as I can how to go about creating and designing access with as few skills as possible required up of up front because I started out with no skills so if I can do it I think anybody else can so I'm going to divide access into three basic sections and these different sections really integrate with one another but it's helpful if we if we organize things and try to cover them in in some sort of organization but you'll see later on how these all integrate with one another and the first thing is you really have something called a database this is a kind of your this is where your data is actually stored okay it's essentially your database so where does where does your database what is a database where does it go where does your data go and that could be any number of different types of database systems and these are just some of them these are the more popular ones you got Oracle my sequel ms which microsoft sequel access itself is actually a database system which accesses call is runs on something called the jet engine so you may hear that term frequently whenever you're dealing with access so Oracle my sequel MS sequel and access are all different types of database systems there are many others there's post gree you know there's you know honestly none of them none of the other ones are coming off the top of my head but you can really there's a bunch of ones out there called no sequel which are really interesting there's also other types of ways that you can store information like XML files or JSON which are more web based web oriented ways of storing your data but primarily your relational databases are Oracle my sequel MS sequel and access these are the ones that we'll be focusing on during this course so in databases there will be types of data because obviously not all data is the same sometimes you have numbers sometimes you have geographical locations sometimes you have what we call string or text which is just you know like say for example an address is beta of both numbers and letters well that would actually be considered string or text and when it comes to databases they're stored as a form of text different types of data can be like n var car or in Access it's just text or you can have numeric or float or double and we'll get all those different data types a little bit later but just understand that your different kinds of data will have to be you will need to know what what is the type of data that you're planning on putting into your database in any particular circumstance and it'll become pretty obvious to you as you start going along what it is that's going to happen so you also will need to know when it comes to databases how is it organized what first of all you have these things called tables and we'll get into all of that but essentially your data gets stored into these tables which are if you've ever dealt with Excel you'll you're you'll see these tables and they'll make a lot of sense to you because tables are very similar and through the way that information is organized in Excel you have cells you have columns you have rows and you know it's really very simple as far as how those tables are func function relationships are the way in which different tables interact with each other because you may have say for example an address and you want to break down your address into different sections maybe you want to have your addresses the first line is in one table the second line is in another table and your zip codes are stored in another table and how all of those interact and become one one piece of information is very important you need to be able to know I have this customer and this is their address you may store the customer names in one table and the address information in another table which is a very common situation we'll go into the relationships obviously in great detail so how do you get to the data and that's where we have these things called queries you have a special what they call sequel language or SQL and the sequel the sequel is just a query language that basically is a type of coding in a way which organizes your data tells the database how you want your data what kind of data you're going for and how that you want it organized and you can do calculations and such there's a lot that you can do with your queries to really organize your data and tell your tell your database is exactly the format in which you want that data to come back the second part that would be going over is the user interface this is things like how do you get the person actually put in data obviously you've got a database in the background you want to be able to have somebody put data into that data into that database so you have these things called forms which allow somebody to type data in and store it etc then obviously you need to know how that information is supposed to be displayed to the user okay and that's primarily in the form of reports and forms and then you also have and I put exporting as part of the user interface because essentially with what you're doing with an export is you're trying to either interact with another storage system of data which the user then will deal with on their own sometimes you can have some automatic integration like if you want to print something or you want to store it to PDF but usually once you export a file out to another system then the user has to interact with that so it's kind of a user interface way of dealing with the data once it's put out and you will have different ways that this information gets displayed to the user in the sports so the third and final section we're going to talk about is the code-behind and this is this consists of VBA and there is also something called macros which we'll get to in just a second but VBA is essentially Visual Basic for applications and this is a this VBA is used in all office applications including Excel Word and an access all use VBA so if you know VBA which is just essentially Visual Basic 6 with a little application twist so if you know any Visual Basic 6 which has been discontinued by Microsoft by the way VBA will be very very simple to you and actually that's one of the nice things about learning from the VBA standpoint is that you actually are learning VB 6 which was the version of Visual Basic prior to the dotnet releases and Kody Hines can be you know your VBA is basically organized into either modules looks like I'm missing out there we go or classes and classes are a form of object-oriented programming and VBA uses classes and can use object-oriented programming in order to design your your code and how things are interact interact with with the person who's using your application macros are a simple way of there are very kind of dumbed down version not to say that they're not complex in that they can't do complex things they're just kind of a very simple way of of doing things and interacting with your application that you know if you want to like move back and forth between screens but you want to do it quickly without having to do all the VBA code in the background you can do that with macros I personally tend to stay away from macros I don't really find them useful in any way but certainly some people can they will not be covered in this course I don't really want to get into macros because honestly everything you can do in macros you can do with VBA and VBA is just much more extensive and gives you a little bit more control over how everything operates in the background all right so let's go ahead and get started with the first section here and I hope you guys are as excited as I am to get this this party started thank you very much

Channel: Programming Made EZ

Views: 582,140

Rating: 4.9266181 out of 5

Keywords: Microsoft, Access, 2013, Programming, VBA, Visual Basic, Applications, tutorial, lesson, guide, database, SQL, beginner, advanced, Software, Microsoft Access (Software), introduction, free, basic, program, user interface, forms, queries, tables, form, query, table, backend, front end, back, end, front, report, reports, reporting

Id: kogGwRIHH6o

Length: 13min 39sec (819 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 22 2013