IA6

This past assignment taught me a new skill set.  I was familiar with excel before we started this assignment so it wasn’t to challenging.  This assignment dug into access and showed me how in depth and efficient it can be.  There’s a page called relationships.  You connect the common fields in the data tables and from there you can make queries, forms and reports that show even more data and you can see even more at once.  When working on excel its useful but its flat.  Flat like there’s only one view and you see it all at once or in small chunks and can’t go to far beyond there.  The key in the table is something that is unique to the table like for example in the employee table the key is the employee ID.  The relationships, like I said before, are ways to connect all your different tables and have them open together and combine the data.  The queries are what you can use when you are searching for things to add, change, delete, or whatever you need.  It makes it easier for you to find their items without you having to search through all your data.  Forms are just ways that makes it easier to view the data or get the exact items you want.  You can change the way that your forms are displayed.  That’s a good thing if this is for a business where multiple people will be using it so it is apparent and efficient.  One of my friends has a very a very successful nail polish business.  She does have a lot of customers new and returning but I always tell her that she needs to start collecting emails so she can promote her new series and let people know about sales and coupons.  If she did start getting email addresses I could set up an access data sheet for her and include all her orders and all her customers.  She could even keep track of her suppliers.  I think the use of the relational databases would be beneficiary to any business whether its large or just individual.