To support efficient business operations and good decision making, it's important to avoid creating information islands, a situation in which key business data is only available to certain people using certain systems. To help you make sure you can put the right data in the right locations, Microsoft® Access® provides numerous options you can use to import data from other systems into Access, export data from Access out to other systems, and to establish live connections between Access and external data sources.

You have used queries to select data from one or more sources, filter that data, combine it with other data, summarize it, and perform a variety of other tasks. Although these capabilities make queries useful for viewing, analyzing, and reporting, they also provide a useful basis for automating data management tasks and making mass updates to the database. You can use the querying features available in Microsoft® Access® to help you better manage your data.

Relational databases can contain numerous tables representing many concepts, and the data stored within those tables may be related in complex ways. The database developer may sometimes find it challenging to clearly present such complex data to users through reports and forms. Fortunately, Microsoft® Access® provides numerous features that can help you present complex information in ways that make sense to users—such as subreports, subforms, navigation forms, and popup forms.

Through Microsoft® Access® database features such as tables, forms, queries, SQL, properties, lookup lists, relationships, and so forth, there are many ways to make it easier for users to enter and use data, ensure the data users enter is valid, and ensure referential integrity. Macros provide an additional layer of capability to support these goals.

You have seen how you can use macros in Microsoft® Access® to perform repetitive tasks or actions that are difficult for users to perform. VBA provides additional tools that you can use to extend the capabilities of your database, with a somewhat different approach to programming.

Creating tables, queries, forms, reports, and macros in Microsoft® Access® is only part of the job of managing a database or multiple databases. As a database designer and administrator, you must perform many non-creative, non-design tasks, such as backing up databases, repairing and consolidating your databases, maintaining database performance, and documenting database information. As the database administrator, you have the responsibility of guaranteeing database integrity through good design, clean data, and a healthy database.

Microsoft® Access® provides database administrators with tools to move from a single-user database to a multiple-user networked database application. Microsoft has leveraged Access to be able to handle a lot of heavy database processing before a solution like Microsoft's SQL Server® is required. And, if you need to move up to SQL Server, Access enables you to do so seamlessly. This lesson prepares you for multiple-user access and splitting your databases into front-end and back-end components. You're also given tools to implement security for your databases, including trusted locations, passwords, conversion to ACCDE format, and digital signatures.

You'll wrap things up and then validate what you've learned in this course by taking an assessment.