1) A list of important items in your home and their cost when you purchased them.

2) An address book with all your friends, businesses, doctors, lawyers in it including e-mails and phone numbers.

3) Recipes for all your favorite goodies...And anything else you might want to store in a manner that retrieval is quick and easy.

I’ll warn you right here that creating a database in Access 2000 is not quick or easy but once done, it’s very quick and easy to use.

Now let’s get started by designing an address book. They are simple and easy to create for beginners. Don’t think that Access 2000 is only for beginners. It is anything but. When you learn to use Access, you will be running with the big dogs. Access 2000 is no toy! It is a full-fledged relational database capable of creating almost any database you can imagine. But we are only going to concern ourselves with the basics.

So, what do we want to store in our address book files?

1) I suggest we store names, addresses, phone numbers, e-mails, and pertinent notes about each person.

2) Next we will want to be able to use our database to print out addresses on labels to put on all our xmas card envelopes. Wow! What a work saver that will be!

3) We want to be able to use our database to print out a phone number and e-mail list so we can keep up with all the changes people make at various times. That should be enough to get into for starters.

If now you are wondering how all this is done. Well Access uses Tables to store all information you put into it. A table is a file of columns and rows. The columns are titled to represent the information that the rows will contain. For example a column for e-mail addresses could be titled e-mail. Then each row under the e-mail column would contain someone's e-mail address. You can store as many rows of e-mail addresses as you want.

All information in Access is stored in tables of columns and rows.