New in
A smart tag appears as a shortcut menu that displays options pertinent to a specificOffice 2003
word, field, or type of content. For example, if Word determines that several words you Smart Tagstyped might be a person’s name, it will place a purple dotted line beneath them. If you move the mouse pointer over the underlined words, Word displays a Smart Tag Actions button. When you click this button Word displays a list of possible actions that includes sending e-mail, scheduling a meeting, and adding to contacts.
Smart tags were introduced as part of Windows XP and were supported in some Office XP programs. With Office 2003 they have been extended to Access.
When you create a table in Access, you can apply one or more smart tags to each field. When information from that field is displayed in a table, form, or query, and the mouse pointer is moved over the text, the Smart Tag Action button is displayed and some action can be taken that is appropriate for the kind of information.
There are not currently a lot of smart tags available for use in Access, but they are being created by third-party developers and made available on the Web.
Key Points
■ Microsoft Office Access 2003 includes wizards to help you quickly and easily create databases and their objects, such as tables, queries, forms and reports. ■ In Design view, you can modify any object you created with a wizard.
■ Rather than storing all information in one table, you can create several different tables for each specific type of information, such as employee contact infor mation, customer contact information, and supplier contact information. ■ Properties determine what data can be entered in a field, and how the data will
look on the screen. In Design view, you can change some properties without affecting the data stored in the table; but changing some might affect the data, so you must exercise caution when modifying properties.
■ You can adjust the structure of a table—by manipulating or hiding columns and rows—without affecting the data stored in the table.
■ When you create a table in Access, you can apply one or more smart tags to each field. When information from that field is displayed in a table, form, or query, and the mouse pointer is moved over the text, the Smart Tag Action button is displayed and some action can be taken that is appropriate for the kind of information.
an Access database, page 66 other databases, page 68 an HTML file, page 69 an XML file, page 71
Import information from a fixed-width text file, page 63 Import information from a delimited text file, page 61
Link a database to information in another database, page 76 Import information from Excel, page 58
3
Getting Information Into
and Out of a Database
In this chapter you will learn to:✔ Import information from Excel.
✔ Import information from a delimited text file. ✔ Import information from a fixed-width text file. ✔ Import information from an Access database. ✔ Import information from other databases. ✔ Import information from an HTML file. ✔ Import information from an XML file. ✔ Export information to other programs.
✔ Link a database to information in another database. ✔ Share Access data other ways.
Not many people enjoy typing information in a database, so one of your goals when designing a relational database is to structure the tables in such a way that the same information never has to be entered more than once. If, for example, you are designing a database to track customer orders, you don’t want sales clerks to have to type the name of the customer in each order. So you need a customer table to hold all the pertinent information about each customer, and you can then simply reference a customer ID in each order. If information about a customer changes, you only have to update it in one place in the database: the customer table. In this way, the only item of customer information in the order records (the ID) remains accurate. An added benefit of this system is that you reduce the confusion that can result from typo- graphical errors and from having the same information appear in different formats throughout the database.
Good database design saves keystrokes when you’re entering new information and maintaining the database, but even more time and effort can be saved in another way. As part of The Microsoft Office System, Microsoft Office Access 2003 can easily share information with the other programs in The Microsoft Office System. It also makes it easy to populate a database by importing information in numerous other formats. If the information that you intend to store in an Access database has already been entered into almost any other electronic document, it is quite likely that you can move
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Office
Specialis
Microsoft
Office
Specialis
If your information is still being actively maintained in another program and you want to bring it into Access to analyze it, create reports, or easily export it to another format, you should consider linking your Access database to the existing information in its original program rather than importing the information. When you link to data in another program, you can view and edit it in both programs, and what you see in Access is always up to date.
Many companies that store accounting, manufacturing, marketing, sales, and other information on their computers have discovered the advantages of sharing this infor mation within the company through an intranet, or with the rest of the world through the Internet. With Access, you can speed up this process by exporting the information stored in a database as Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and Extensible Markup Language (XML) pages.