From the course: Access Basics for Excel Users

Source additional data - Microsoft Access Tutorial

From the course: Access Basics for Excel Users

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Source additional data

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- [Instructor] Before we get going with this video, make sure you open up the database file 02_02_MoreData. Now the true power of Access comes from its relational database functionality. A relational database is essentially a way of linking data from different places using a common field or identifier that exists in both of those places. At the moment as you can see, we only have the one data table in our database called Employment Data. So how 'about we go ahead and import an additional but related set of data into our database? Let's go ahead to External Data, click on New Data Source, From File, and then select Excel. Now let's go ahead and browse to the file that is the exercise file that has been included with this video called 02_02_Category. Double-click on it and then select OK. Now this step here is really important. We need to make sure that the checkbox next to First Row Contains Column Headings has been selected. Have a look at what happens when we select this checkbox. The area name and area category have been picked up as our column headings. Now what we need to do is click on Finish and then click on Close. As you can see under All Access Objects, we now have two data tables including the category one that we just imported. Now let's go ahead and open up a preview of both of these tables simply by double-clicking on each of them. Now the Employment Data table provides some historical data about the labor force in California. In fact, as you can see, there are over 20,000 records, and this goes back all the way to the year 1990 which we can see here by clicking on the end record. Let's go back to the first record by clicking on this icon. The category table simply categorizes each area name as either small, medium, or large based on the relative population size of each of these areas. So as you can see, each area name appears only once, so there are only 58 records. Now if we toggle between these two tables, you'll notice that there is a match between the area names here, and this means that we are ready to go ahead and start creating a relationship between these two tables.

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