You may use either Microsoft Access 2000 or XP for LIS 384K.11. You will find that the differences between the 2000 and XP versions of Access are quite minor so far as the work in the course is concerned; and the Cassel and Palmer book, although based on Access 2000, works equally well in helping you learn Access XP.
To make your computer’s displays resemble those in the Cassel and Palmer book as closely as possible, you should set your screen resolution in Windows ME (or 98or XP) or Windows 2000 (or NT) to 800x600. (To set this, click on Start-Settings-Control Panel-Display and then choose the Settings tab. Under this tab, the Desktop Area section controls the screen resolution settings. If you change the setting, be sure that you test the new setting before you commit your system to it.)
Please feel free to comment to me, preferably by email to rew@gslis.utexas.edu, on any difficulties you encounter in studying the Cassel and Palmer text, so that I can add helpful notes to this Webpage.
Although Access 2000 (and XP and 97) can handle field names containing white space, many other database programs are not be able to do so. I strongly urge you to develop, in your own database-design work, the habit of never including white space in field names, just to prevent possible later difficulties. A frequently used separator that can make names easier to read without risking the possible problems of white spaces is the underscore: e.g., Last_Name.
Access
often uses a dot notation to associate fields with the tables to which they belong.
This dot notation, <tablename>.<fieldname>, is used widely in RDBMSs
in general, not just in Access.
On pages 40-41, Cassel and Palmer discuss the "Use Taskbar for Each Object" option in the Tools-Options-View window. In Service Release 1 of Access 2000, this option appears to have been dropped and replaced by the "Windows in Taskbar" option. You can safely ignore the discussion, as well as Exercise 2 on page 69.
On page 47, Cassel and Palmer first mention SQL, the Structured Query Language. SQL is an extremely important topic in the management of relational databases, since it is an ANSI (and ISO) standard for use in relational DBMSs. To get a first look at SQL, you should: select a query; click on Design View; and once in Design View, select SQL View from the leftmost combo box in the Toolbar (the combo box directly under File on the Menu). Access will display the SQL statement that underlies this query. You will learn more about SQL later in Cassel and Palmer (and in LIS 384K.11) For now, just note that the SQL statement contains capitalized words, which are reserved words in the formal vocabulary of SQL, together with the names of the fields in the various tables with which the query deals. (The reserved words do not have to be capitalized for SQL to work; but capitalization of reserved words is frequently employed, because it helps humans read SQL.)
On page 93, Cassel and Palmer mention "referential integrity" briefly. Referential integrity is an important concept in relational database-management systems (RDBMSs), and you will learn more about it later in the Cassel and Palmer book; but for now the definition of it from the Access 2000 (and 97) online help is worth quoting:
Rules that you follow to preserve the defined relationships between tables when you enter or delete records. If you enforce referential integrity, Microsoft Access prevents you from adding records to a related table when there is no associated record in the primary table, changing values in the primary table that would result in orphan records in a related table, and deleting records from the primary table when there are matching related records in a related table.
Note that Access stores all parts of a database in one large file. In another arrangement, used by some other DBMSs, a different directory (or directory tree) is used to house each different database that the DBMS handles, and the DBMS stores individual files within a given database in that database’s directory (or directory tree). Thus if you accidentally change a component of an Access database, you will either have to open the database again and manually undo the change to the component, or you will have to re-copy all of the database from your back-up copy. The latter will often be the faster choice, assuming that you have maintained a back-up copy. Clearly, it is a good idea to make a back-up copy of any database you create in working through this book (and, indeed, any database you create for other purposes) and to update it each time you finish working on the exercises in Cassel and Palmer.
As you work with queries, you should bear in mind that a query in Access can also be thought of as a particular type of "view". The term "view" is used in relational database-management in general to refer to ways of displaying part or all of the contents of one or more tables so as to make it convenient for humans to see those contents.
Briefly on page 24, again on pages 198-199, and in Day 18, Cassel and Palmer offer a glimpse at Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), a programming language that Microsoft provides for use with its Office applications. VBA is closely related to Visual Basic, a full- fledged programming language tailored for the development of Windows applications in general. VBA can be characterized as consisting of various sets of extensions of Visual Basic for the various Office programs (Word, Excel, Access, etc.). If you would like to look further into VBA, one place to start is with the book by Smith and Sussman [see Endnote 2].
With respect to comments and remarks in writing VBA code, as well as in writing code for expressions, combo boxes, etc., in Access, Cassel wrote the following noteworthy statement in an earlier version of this book:
DON'T fall into the trap of not adding remarks while writing the code with the excuse that you'll come back to it later. That time rarely comes, and if it does, you might have forgotten what remarks need to be made. I've been guilty of this rationalization more times than is healthy! It's not worth the aggravation, trust me.
In other words, "Document as you go along, not later!"
On
page 251 Cassel and Palmer first mention "Update Queries." You need
to be aware of the somewhat distinct meanings of "update query" and
"delete query". An update query acts on (i.e., modifies the contents
of) fields and is the only type of query that affects fields rather than records.
The modifications can include erasing the contents of fields (though not actually
deleting the fields themselves). A delete query acts on records, by deleting them.
The term "report," in database parlance, originally referred to printouts of data, as distinguished from the terms "form" and "view", which refer to data displayed on the computer screen (as in data-entry forms, queries, database views, etc.) That original emphasis on the printed form as been extended, in the new era of the World-Wide Web, so that the term "report" is now also used to refer to ways in which data have been organized for presentation on the WWW.
On pages 293-294 Cassel and Palmer mention joins. One way of describing right outer joins is: "The first type of outer join, the right outer join, returns all matchable records from the righthand side of the joined tables." An analogous statement can be made about left outer joins.
On
page 304, Cassel and Palmer first discuss the concept of a calculated field, as
part of their discussion of expressions. A calculated field is a field that
exists in no table; its contents are calculated "on the fly" by Access
when the query containing this calculated field is run. Calculated fields are
an important concept in the management of relational databases. They are virtual
fields, taking up no storage space. The storage space is not needed because the
data in calculated fields are entirely dependent on data that are actually stored
elsewhere, so that the storage of the calculated values would be a complete waste
of space. The computation time required to calculate, on the fly, the entries
in a calculated field is trivial, since computers are superb at doing arithmetic.
The computations can be easily done by the CPU in slack times during the much
slower process of retrieving, from disk-stored tables, data that must be stored
and are not calculable.
You should experiment with the effect (if any) of specifying more than one sort criterion. For example, in the Exercises for Day 4 what happens if you specify that Name should be sorted Descending and Surname should be sorted Ascending? (You will find that Access permits only one field at a time to be a sort field in a Query. However, in Reports, as Cassel and Palmer explain later, it is possible to sort on more than one field at a time. Note that in multi-field sorting, one field must be chosen as the primary sort field; another field, as the secondary sort field; still another field, as the tertiary sort field; and so on. Thus, a file could be sorted first on the surnames of people, then secondarily on their first names, and tertiarily on their middle names or initials.)
My intent in asking you to turn in the deliverables assigned below is to help you keep to a reasonably tight schedule in working your way through the basics of Microsoft Access. Your adhering to the schedule below will help you in at least two important ways: (1) you will quickly become comfortable with using Access and (2) your understanding of the theoretical concepts discussed in class will be aided by your encountering concrete examples of those concepts as handled in Access.
Work Assignment: Days 1 through 4 in Cassel and Palmer
Deliverable. After carrying out Exercises 4 - 6 on page 69, print out the page (and only that single page) that contains the (beginnings of the) set of phone numbers you added. Write your name on your printout and turn it in at the class meeting in Week 2 of the course.
Deliverable. After carrying out Exercise 12 on page 134, print out the page (and only that single page) that contains the beginnings of the set of records that were returned by the criteria in your query. The page should have fields "Birth Year and "Surname" at the left edge, followed by some other fields. (You will probably need to use the Windows Print Preview function to select the desired page for printing.) Write your name on your printout and turn it in at the class meeting in Week 2 of the course.
Work Assignment: Days 5 through 8 in Cassel and Palmer
Deliverable. After carrying out Exercise 6 on page 242, print out the first printable page (and only that single page) of the Webpage that you created. Write your name on your printout and turn it in at the class meeting in Week 3 of the course.
Work Assignment: Days 9 through 12 in Cassel and Palmer
Deliverable.
After carrying out Exercise 3 on page 343, print out the first printable page
(and only that single page) of the report that you created. Write your
name on it, and hand it in at the class meeting in Week 4 of the course.
Work Assignment: Days 13 through 16 in Cassel and Palmer
Deliverable. After carrying out Exercise 2 on page 501, print out the first printable page (and only that single page) of the subform that you created. Write your name on it, and hand it in at the class meeting in Week 5 of the course.
Work Assignment: Days 17 through 21 in Cassel and Palmer
Deliverable. Write a brief statement touching on (1) what you found especially useful in the Cassel and Palmer book, (2) what you found difficult or obscure, and (3) any recommendations or suggestions you may care to offer to aid future students in using this book in studying Microsoft Access. Ensure that your name is on the statement and hand it in at the class meeting in Week 6 of the course.
ENDNOTES
1. Cassel, Paul; Palmer, Pamela. Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft Access 2000 in 21 Days. 785 p. Indianapolis, IN: Sams; 1999. ISBN:0-672-31292-1.
2. Smith, Robert; Sussman, David. Beginning Access 97 VBA Programming. 614 p. Birmingham, UK: Wrox; 1997. ISBN:1-861000-86-3. [Includes a CD-ROM with utilities and sample databases.]
Go to Course Description: Database-Management
Principles and Applications.
Go to Course Schedule:
Database-Management Principles and Applications.
Go to Guide
to Course Materials for LIS 384K.11.
Go to Wyllys Webpage.
Last revised 2004 Feb 23