How to create an Access database from templates

Posted on April 25, 2009 at 5:06 am

Office Access 2007 includes a pack of prebuilt stand alone database applications. I usually use the templates to get started on an MS Access project. With a template, you won’t have to start from scratch – you have something working right from the start.

The trick is to find the right template that will match your requirement. Usually the templates are good enough for generic database requirements. In some cases, a little tweaking is involved to suite the client’s need.

For beginning MS Access users, below are steps for creating a new Access file from templates. First click Control N to create a new Access file, then choose from the template categories. The local templates include some interesting templates that you could choose from.

Choose a local template that fits your requirement. In the following example, I chose “Contacts” so I could show you how to customize a contact database.

Give your tracking file a name, by default it will be named according to the template type. Click the Create button to create the Access file.

The database should come up. You will see a tabular Excel-like interface where you can do operations like adding a new contact entry.

If you click the add new contact button it will open a new contact form where you can type in a contact detail.

Now what if you need to update this form’s layout and labels? It’s simple, just right click the form’s name at the left hand side then choose Design View:

With the design view, you can update the form’s layout and content.

You can also go to a table object’s design view to edit the fields of the table. The example below is for the contact’s table:

Here you may set the fields along with their corresponding data types. Make sure to use the appropriate data type for a field or else you could end up with an inefficient Access file. For example, use only the memo data type if you know that the field will take a longer than usual single line of text like for addresses or messages.

Also, set the right field size according to the maximum number of characters that you expect on a field. Do not use 100 characters for an email address field.

I hope this little introduction to Access templates will get you started with your small data driven projects. In the next posts I will show you how to display data from Access using a PHP web page.