Create the database file

- [Narrator] Unlike the other Office programs that immediately give you a blank document to get started in, Access starts with the options for creating a new database or opening an existing database. On the first screen we see the option to create a brand new empty blank database with this icon right here. Or you might also see some featured templates to choose from. You can also search thousands of online templates using the search box up here at the top. Microsoft suggests searching for business, logs, industry, inventories, and things like that. Let's suppose that I have a large record collection and I like to share with friends and families.

I can run a quick search for library. And when I press enter, one of the results is a lending library database, which sounds interesting. Let's go ahead and give it a click, and take a look. This will show me a preview of the database here and also will give me a description over here on the right. In this case, this database will help me track inventories of books and other materials you might loan out. You can get reports on who has what materials, when they're due back, and see the checkout history of each person. If this sounds like it'll fit my needs, I can simply fill in the file name and path area down below and press the Create button to get started.

When I do that, Access will download the template and I can get started managing my collection. The templates are great if you just want to get up and running with the task of storing your data. But they're also great resources for learning about how Access works. Some of them include some very sophisticated layout ideas and techniques that can help give you ideas on things you can add to your own databases. For instance, this lending library template looks like it has a row of buttons up across the top. We can do things like add new inventory assets to our collection, or print reports.

This could be an interesting user interface convention you would like to implement in your own custom database. So, downloading the template might be useful for no other reason than to explore how it works. So once we get a better handle on how Access databases are built and function, it might be a worthwhile exercise to come back and spend a few minutes exploring some of these templates, and attempt to take them apart to see how they work under the hood. We're gonna go ahead and skip the templates for now and press the X at the upper right-hand corner. Then, I'll press the back button to return to the initial screen.

Now, if you don't want to start with a template, the left-hand side of the screen will display a listing of recent files that you've previously been working on. Or give you the option to take a look at other files. Let's go ahead and click on that link. This will take us to a screen where we can locate files on our computer to work with. To get back to the templates list, go ahead and click the New button or click on the Back button. Let's start from scratch on a new database by clicking on the blank desktop database icon. Access will ask us for a name, and a location for the file. I'll go ahead and name it Landon Hotel.

I'll click on the folder icon, and we'll choose a file location on my computer. We're going to save it into the Exercise Files folder inside of the Chapter 1 folder. Notice the file extension that Access databases use. It's the dot ACCDB file. You also have the option of using the dropdown menu below to choose the older file format, the MDB database, if you need backwards compatibility with older systems. I'm gonna stick with the modern dot ACCDB file and press the OK button. Then I'll come over here and press the Create button.

Access will create the database, and it'll open up a new data table ready for us to get started designing our database. Let's go ahead and close this table for now. To do that, press the X in the right-hand side of the tab bar. Or press the CTRL+W shortcut key to close the active tab. We'll spend plenty of time building tables in the next chapter. So that's how you create a new database file. Unlike Word or Excel, where you can jump right in and get started working before saving the document, Access needs to have the database file created first. That's because the Access database is really a container that'll eventually hold lots of different objects such as our data tables, queries, forms, and reports.

So, it makes sense that the container needs to be created upfront before we can start filling it with our database objects.