About the Series ...
This article continues the series,
MS Access for the Business Environment. The primary focus of
this series is an examination of business uses for the MS Access relational
database management system. The series is designed to provide guidance in the
practical application of data and database concepts to meet specific needs in
the business world. While the majority of the procedures I demonstrate will be
undertaken with Access 2002, many of the concepts that we expose in the
series will apply to numerous versions of MS Access.
For more information on the
series, as well as the hardware / software requirements to prepare for the
tutorials we will undertake, please see Tutorial
1: Create a Calculated Field with the
Expression Builder.
Introduction to this Tutorial
This tutorial will introduce the
PivotTable in MS Access. Among numerous enhancements that appear in
Access 2002, one of the most exciting is the addition of PivotTable and PivotChart
views for the tables and queries of the database. PivotTables and PivotCharts provide
a means of interactive data analysis, thus broadening our business intelligence
toolset in Access; both allow us to organize and summarize information into
useful analysis presentations called views. We explore the PivotTable
view in this lesson, and then expose the PivotChart view in Lesson
3: Create a PivotChart View in Access.
In this tutorial, we
will focus upon the creation and use of PivotTable views in Access. This lesson
will include:
-
Creation of a basic query upon which to base a PivotTable view.
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A brief introduction to PivotTable Views, including navigation
and features;
-
A practical walkthrough of the process of creating of a
PivotTable view in an Access database.
-
An exploration of steps to take in modifying a PivotTable View
-
A brief discussion of formatting features.
Let's begin by discussing the features of the PivotTable
view. Then, having an idea of the "end purpose," we will look at the
steps required to create a PivotTable view to meet a hypothetical business
need.