Hands-On Microsoft Access: A Practical Guide to Improving Your Access Skills

Midchapter Review

We'll look at the problems of table creation in much more depth in a little while. Right now, let's quickly review what you've done. You first created a mission statement for the Classic TV database. You followed up by developing mission objectives—what you want the database to accomplish. You used those mission objectives to come up with a list of data needs. From those data needs, you developed a preliminary list of columns you could use to store data.

None of these steps is peculiar to relational databases. Creating a mission statement and defining mission objectives aren't bad ideas for any information project—indeed, for achieving any goal. Even when you use a simple spreadsheet to store data, you still have to decide what ...