Newbie Access question

[toro45]

I am a bit of a novice in Access and I was wondering how I can go about using a formula in access, like I can manipulate cells in excel.

I would like to be able to do these manipulations on values I have in my tables.

 

[Norie]

You can use expressions using fields, operators, functions etc.

e.g.

Say you have a date field called 'TransDate' and want to find out the year of TransDate.

You could use something like TransYear:Year([TransDate]).

In the design view of a query this would go on the top line where you would put a query.

For more complex expressions there is an Expression Builder.

If you were to expand on what you widh to do then more specific advice could be given.

 

[mdmilner]

I can tell by how you're asking your question that you do not yet understand how Access is structured. That's ok, you were pretty clear you were new to it.

Access Tables are not the same thing as an Excel Worksheet.

They are both more and less.

In Access, there is no need to add another column with a calculation in it based on the contents of other cells. Instead, you leave the table as-is and setup a query based on that same table. The latter is what Norie is explaining. Queries can display the table data any way you'd like, sorted, conditional, only a partial list of fields, or create(define) new fields based on the contents of others.

It also can allow you to produce a single view with related data from multiple tables. On top of that, queries are just as flexible as tables. You can build more queries on old queries, or export them, just as you might think you could export a table.

And, to display the 'power' of queries. Lets say you make a query - based on a table with 50 records. On day you add 5000 more records (rows in Excel). You can just click on (run) the query and all 5050 records will show up with any new/created fields you defined. There isn't any copying of formula values to do.

Mike