Microsoft Office 2003 All-in-One

As you learned in the previous lesson, Access offers many ways to help you narrow down the information you're looking at, including sorting and filtering. The most flexible way to sort and filter data, however, is using a query.

A query is a question that you pose to a database table or tables. For example, you might want to know which of your customers live in a specific state or how many of your salespeople have reached a particular sales goal. The great thing about queries is that you can save queries and use them to create tables, delete records, or copy records to another table.

Queries enable you to specify

• The table fields that appear in the query

• The order of the fields in the query

• Filter and sort criteria for each field in the query

Queries are a powerful tool for analyzing and summarizing database information. In this lesson, you take a look at the queries you can create using a wizard. Creating queries in the Design view is covered in Lesson 16, "Creating Queries from Scratch."