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This is often said to be "The Information Age."

From applying for a mortgage to getting a quote for double glazing, from getting a loyalty card for your favourite supermarket to entering a prize draw, the first question will almost always be "Can I take your name please?" And of course, we always give it over - we have no choice. But what happens to it? And to the answers to the other 50 questions you are asked as a follow-up?

Almost inevitably, the answer will be that your name, address, phone number, email address and perhaps much more will go into a database. A database is a store for information of any kind - personal information like this, or any other data that needs to be retrieved and used at will. Examples of information that could be stored in a database might be:

• Part numbers and specifications for engine components
• A library catalogue of books, authors, publishers and borrowers
• Recipes, lists of ingredients and potential allergen hazards
• Events, the staff running them and attendees at them
• Sales enquiries and leads

In fact, the list is literally endless - whatever you want to store could be put into a database.

So, how does Access fit into this picture? It is the database application bundled by Microsoft into many (although not all) of its versions of the Office Suite. Along with Word, for creating and editing documents, Excel for data and financial analysis and PowerPoint for presentations comes Access to store, manipulate, retrieve and print all your data.

Technically, Microsoft Access is known as a Relational Database Management System (RDBMS). This means that the information is stored in multiple tables that are then linked, or related, in a structured way. To give an example, one table may store a list of customers and a second the orders for those customers. A defined, structured relationship exists so that the customer ID defined for a customer in the Customers table also serves to identify the orders for that customer in the Orders table (see fig. 1 on the next page)

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