Enter data

- [Narrator] Adding new records to your database is as easy as filling in the blanks. Each record, or horizontal row, will contain information about a single entity. In our case, the guest table will collect information about the individuals that visit the Landon Hotel. Each row will contain information about a single guest. Let's start to put in a couple of records into our database. First, I'll open up our Guests table by double-clicking on it over here in the navigation pane if it's not open already. Notice that each record gets a unique ID number. If you try and type in the first GuestID number here, you'll get a message down the very bottom of the window here that says the control can't be edited, it's bound to an AutoNumber field called "GuestID".

This is Access's way of telling us that it's gonna take care of this number for us. All I need to do is type in the guest's first name, last name and phone number. I'll go ahead and press the Tab key to move over to the FirstName field, and I'll type in the name of our first guess, which is Katherine. Notice that as soon as I start typing, Access assigns the new ID number to that record, and she gets GuestID number one. I'll press the Tab key to move over here to the LastName field and type in her last name of Reid. You can use the arrow keys to move forward and backward across these different cells, or you can press the Enter key when you're done to move down to the next guest.

Let's go ahead and finish up with Katherine's phone number here. And when I press Enter, it will lead down to the second record. I'll go ahead and press the Tab key after the GuestID and type in the FirstName for our second guest, which is Donald. I'll go ahead and continue filling in the information for our first three guests. On the bottom of the table's window, you'll notice this area called the navigation buttons, here.

These allow us to move forward and backward through our table. First I can go ahead and go back to our different records, and also that it changes up here at the top with which one's selected. Let's click and go forward. I can also move to the last record or the very first record of the table. The current record area here in the middle tells me which record I'm currently on out of how many records there are total in the table. In this case, I'm currently selecting record number one of three, which corresponds to Katherine. You can also use this area to jump to a specific record number. Instead of typing in a one here, I'll go ahead and type in three, press Enter, and you'll notice that it jumps me down to record number three.

The last button here will create a new blank record at the very end. When I click it, it moves me down to the last record in the table, which right now is record number four. Now, our table only has three records, so it's not really a big deal to come up here and just click in the fourth record here to add in the new record. But if you'll imagine that when we have a thousand different records in this table, this button down here at the very bottom makes it easy to jump to the bottom of the table to add any new records. We'll talk about the filter and search buttons in a later movie. Now, it's worth noting here that Access is saving all these record entries automatically. As soon as we finish typing in one record and move to the next, Access saves that record to the database, so we never have to worry about losing data.

Notice if I go ahead and close the Guests table now that it doesn't prompt me to save it. The only time you need to save the database is when you're making changes to the structure of it, to the design of tables or forms, or their connections. Whenever you're strictly entering or modifying the data that lives in the database, you don't have to think about saving. Your data will be safe and sound in the Access file. Now once the tables are created, entering data can be as simple as typing into the blank cells. Later in the course, we'll see how we can add additional controls on those cells to help prevent data entry errors such as typos, and help automatically control formatting, such as automatically adding the parentheses around our area codes in the phone number.

We also saw where to look to get some basic information about the contents of our table. For instance, at the very bottom, it tells us how many records we have on this table. This is an important piece of information, and any time I open up a new table, my eyes instinctively flick down to this little box for a quick and easy summary of the number of records that exist in that table.