Special Edition Using Microsoft Office Access 2003

The following special features are included in this book to assist readers.

If you've never used a database management application, you're provided with quick-start examples to gain confidence and experience while using Access with the Northwind Traders sample database. Like Access, this book uses the tabula rasa approach: Each major topic begins with the assumption that you have no prior experience with the subject. Therefore, when a button from the toolbar or control object Toolbox is used, its icon is displayed in the margin.

Tip

Tips describe shortcuts and alternative approaches to gaining an objective. These tips are based on the experience that the author gained during more than seven years of testing successive alpha and beta versions of Access and Microsoft Office Developer (MOD).

Note

Notes offer advice to help you use Access, describe differences between various versions of Access, and explain the few remaining anomalies that you find in Access 2003.

Jet SQL

The book provides numerous examples of Jet SQL statements for queries and Transact-SQL statements for views, functions, and stored procedures.

XML

Part VI of this book includes sample XML, XSL, and XML Schema documents (XSD) and examples of altering XSL Transforms (XSLT) to modify the presentation of HTML documents.

Caution

Cautions are provided when an action can lead to an unexpected or unpredictable result, including loss of data; the text provides an explanation of how you can avoid such a result.

Features that are new or that have been modified in Access 2003 are indicated by the 2003 icon in the margin, unless the change is only cosmetic. Where the changes are extensive and apply to an entire section of a chapter, the icon appears to the left or right of the section head.

Many Access users will upgrade from Access 2000 or Access 97, so the 2002 icon indicates changes that occurred in the upgrade from Access 2000 to 2002.

References to resources available on the Internet such as World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Recommendations are identified by the Web icon.

Cross-references to specific sections in other chapters follow the material that they pertain to, as in the following sample reference:

See "A Section in Another Chapter," p. xxx.

Most chapters include a "Troubleshooting" section at the end of the tutorial and reference contents. The elements of this section help you solve specific problems common and uncommon that you might run into when creating applications that use specific Access features or techniques.

At the end of each chapter is an "In the Real World" section that discusses the relevance of the chapter's content to the realm of production databases, the Internet, and other current computer-related topics that affect Access users and developers. The opinion-editorial (op-ed) style of many of the "In the Real World" sections reflects the author's view of the benefits or drawbacks of new Access features and related Microsoft technologies, based on experience with production Access applications installed by several Fortune 500 corporations.

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