Getting to Know Microsoft Access, Part 5: Retrieving and Arranging Data Meaningfully
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We’ll cover three important and related topics this lesson: filtering and sorting records, and basic queries. When you Sort records you order them in meaningful ways. When you filter records you hide those you don’t want to see. Queries are like powerful filtering and sorting tools that also perform calculations. We’ll discuss some basic queries in this lesson and more advanced queries next time.
Sorting
Records are automatically sorted by primary key. You will however often want to see records sorted another way. You can sort fields in ascending or descending order. To sort your table on a specific field, click into your designated field in datasheet view, and click the "Sort Ascending" or "Sort Descending" button on the toolbar. If you’ll be building a database in a language other than English you can set the sort order for that language in the Tools | Options menu option, under the General tab.
You can sort your records by more than one field. To sort by multiple fields, first make sure the fields you wish to sort by are adjacent to each other in the table. Next, highlight the two fields and sort them. If you save the datasheet when you are finished applying a new sort order the table will remain sorted that way even after you close the database.
Next: Filtering >>
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