Access: Building a Sales Database

Course details

Whether you work in sales or customer service, you need a way to track your sales activity, relationships, and contacts. Microsoft Access is a powerful relational database program that can help you do all that and more. In this course, Laurie Ulrich shows you the ins and outs building a customized database solution, designed for the way you go about selling. If you don't have a satisfactory customer relationship management (CRM) application, you'll appreciate the power Access puts literally at your fingertips to design a completely customized tool. The sales solution database you design—with Laurie's help and examples—will allow you to build and store customer data, look up customer orders, and generate reports such as product price lists and order totals. Along the way, you can learn more intermediate and advanced Access features, such as validation rules, lookup tables, and macros. Plus, learn how to build a navigation form that puts key forms and reports in a single, easy-to-access location.

Learning objectives
Planning your sales database
Building tables
Choosing data types
Setting up field validations
Creating lookup tables
Building and editing relationships
Creating forms
Designing queries
Creating sales reports
Generating useful macros
Designing a convenient navigation form

Concepts

0. Introduction

01 - Building a sales database

1. Planning Your Sales Solution Database

02 - Storyboarding
03 - Brainstorming

2. Creating Your Sales Solution Tables

04 - Table-building tips
05 - Choosing the right data type

3. Field Customization

06 - Validation rules and defaults
07 - Input masks
08 - Lookup tables

4. Relationships

09 - Laying the groundwork for relationships
10 - Creating basic relationships between tables
11 - Editing relationships

5. Forms

12 - Create a form for each table
13 - Adding interactive data entry controls to a form
14 - Adding related table-based controls to a form
15 - Creating lookup controls
16 - Multiple-customer record form
17 - Create a read-only form
18 - Adding a field to a form
19 - Using tab order to change interactive form order
20 - Creating navigation buttons for forms

6. Queries

21 - Customer status
22 - Customers reviewing quotes
23 - Customers last order date
24 - Products by vendor
25 - Customer orders over a specific amount
26 - Concatenating combining fields in a query

7. Reports

27 - Customer directory
28 - Product price list
29 - Adding record counts and net profits
30 - Order report
31 - Formatting - Add graphic, change background colors, and add lines

8. Macros

32 - Creating a macro that opens a form
33 - Adding macro buttons on forms and reports
34 - Creating a macro to display a report that contains a button that runs a query

9. Sales Solution Interface

35 - Sales solution navigation form
36 - Edit the navigation form
37 - Make a navigation form that opens when you open Access

Conclusion

38 - Next steps