Creating and Using Action Queries

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If you need to make changes to records or move a group of records in MS Access, you may want to use an action query. This article explains what an action query is, as well as two of the four basic types of action queries.

Displaying data is one thing, but making changes to the data is another. Data often comes from many tables, and in a relational database system updating one table may create problems in another related table or tables. This tutorial will look at an isolated table, but in a following tutorial making changes to tables that are related will be described in detail.

Action query in MS Access is a query that makes changes to records, or moves many records. Two out of four basic action queries in MS Access will be described with examples. This tutorial is for the new users of MS Access and they will benefit greatly by reviewing the other MS Access tutorials on the ASP Free site.

The Employees table

In order to look at action queries, a new mdb file was created called CRUD. The Employees table from the Northwind database was imported into this file. This is easily done by following the File-->Get External Data-->Import.. command string. The design view of this table is shown in the next picture. This will be the starting point for this tutorial. From this table we will create a new table using the Make Table action query.

The Make Table query

This action query takes a table or a a number of tables and, using the data from them, creates a new table. In this way you can create a table that can be exported to a new Microsoft database, or set up an archive of important data. The make table query results in the creation of a view of the table that contains a subset of the columns in the table. In the example that follows a make table query will be created. The query will create and populate a table that has only the address information of the employees.

Next: Creating an Employee Addresses Table Using a Select Query >>
 

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