The following reading details how to create a range of queries using both the Query Wizard and Query Design View. Concentrate on understanding the Design View as it will give you much more power and flexability in your queries. By the time you have finished the reading you should feel confident that you can extract information from the database.

Tips & Tricks

The querying skills you have learnt generalise to much more than just Access. With some adjustments, the same querying techniques can be used on most databases.

Never store data in a table that you can calculate. For example, do not have an age field if you already have a date of birth field. Storing both is a form of data duplication - something you should avoid at all costs. In this example you should store the date of birth which does not change rather than the age which needs to be updated once a year (also if you do not store the date of birth how will you know when to update the age?). If you need the age, you can use a calculated query.