microsoft-office-professional-2010-step-by-step

796 Chapter 26 Create Databases and Simple Tables
Creating Databases and Tables Manually
Suppose you need to store different types of information for different types of people.
For example, you might want to maintain information about employees, customers, and
suppliers. In addition to the standard information—such as names, addresses, and phone
numbers—you might want to track these other kinds of information:
● Employee identification numbers, hire dates, marital status, deductions, and pay rates
● Customer orders and account status
● Supplier contacts, current order status, and discounts
You could start with a template, add fields for all the different items of information to
a single Contacts table, and then fill in only the relevant fields for each type of contact.
However, cramming all this information into one table would soon get pretty messy. It’s
better to create a new database based on the Blank Database template and then manually
create separate tables for each type of contact: employee, customer, and supplier.
When you create a new blank database or insert a new table into an existing database,
the table is displayed on a tabbed page in Datasheet view with one empty row that is
ready to receive data. Because the active object is a table, Access adds the Table Tools
contextual tabs to the ribbon so that you can work with the table.
A new table in a new database.