This week's lesson about Databases really amazed me, half because I knew the programs were out there to use to make them, but never knew what the name of those programs were or how they worked. The power point lectures served as a really great tool on how to get the basics down on how to use Access. Although the questions on the scavenger hunt were a bit tricky, I was able to find them and I hope that "cheat sheet" scavenger hunt paper will help me for the project! I'm a bit nervous- he said this would be the HARDEST one?! I thought the Excel one was pretty tricky.
One topic of databases that are pretty interesting are Fields. A field is a combination of one or more related characters or bytes and according to the textbook on page 518 Chapter 10, is the smallest unit of data a user accesses.
The field size often determines that maximum number of characters a field can contain. There are different types of data that can go into fields. Below is a little list I compiled using some examples from the book:
- Text: This would be letters, numbers or certain special characters
- Numeric: This would be numbers only
- Date: This would include month, day and year, and sometimes time
- Memo: This category would be long text entries
- Yes/No: Only values that are True or False
- Hyperlink: This would be an e-mail address or a web address
- Object: This could be audio, video, photo or a document like a spreadsheet
- Attachment: This would be a document or image that is attached to the field
One of this biggest fields I was having trouble understanding is the "Date/Time" field. I tried to play around with it a little in Acess myself, but still felt like I was not grasping the entire concept. I read up on it in the book, and then came across this video on eHow.com that talks a little bit more about it. Below is the link to the public video:
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