View Information in a Database

Suppose you’re the new personnel manager of Northwind Traders, an import/export company. Your first task in your new position is to review and update employee data.

Start Microsoft Access. Make sure Open an existing database is selected. To open the Northwind database, click Northwind and then click OK. The Northwind Database window appears. On the Tables tab, click Employees, and then click Open.

Can’t see the contents of a column?   Resize the column to fit the data by double-clicking the right side of the column heading.

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Want to know more?   Look up Getting Results - First Database in Help.

What Is a Relational Database?

A relational database—such as the Northwind database—stores information in a collection of tables, each containing data about one subject. Because the tables are related, you can use information from more than one table at a time.

For example, you may want to combine information from an Employees table with an Orders table to create a report of total sales per employee for the past month. The two tables share one type of information (in this case, the employee ID number), but otherwise maintain discrete data. Storing data in related tables is very efficient because you store a fact just once, which reduces disk storage requirements and makes updating and retrieving data much faster.