Database Project

I hadn’t used Microsoft Access since about 2002 or 2003, so I learned a lot from this project. The last time I used this application was in the eighth grade, but I don’t know why instructors stopped teaching Access in class because it is very useful in the business world. Many companies have many recurring customers, and in result many companies have a lot of information on customers due to recurrence and good relationships. There are many instances when the company would need to sort and organize this massive amount of data, and Microsoft Access Is perfect for that. For example, what if the company wants to send out promotions to their customers but only a specific demographic of customers? Their customer database must be sorted to filter in only the customers that fit that demographic.

A really good way to increase the functionality of any Access database is by modifying the field properties. We didn’t really have to modify any field properties for this project but I did anyway. For example, we had over 1,000 gym member in the project database. When entering this much data into the system any assistance is beneficial. So I used “input mask” on both the zip code field and the home phone number field. Instead of a home phone number being ten numbers in one row (8632945465), it appeared as (863) 294-5465 as I was entering the data. There are many more beneficial applications of the field properties. For example, you can edit how many characters can be used in a field with the “field size” property. You can edit the format of any field’s text so it would appear differently. If a field is crucial information you can edit its property to be a required field. The benefits that can be obtained from field property modification are infinite.