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Introduction
Part VII: Appendixes
The last part contains three appendixes. Appendix A documents the Access 2010 specifications,
including maximum and minimum sizes of databases and many of the controls in Access.
Appendix B briefs you on what’s new with Access 2010. Appendix C describes the contents of this
book’s CD-ROM.Guide to the Examples
The examples in the Microsoft Access 2010 Bible are specially designed to maximize your learning
experience. Throughout this book, you’ll see many examples of good business table design and
implementation, form and report creation, and module coding in Visual Basic. You’ll see examples
that use both Jet and ACE (the database engines built into Microsoft Access 2007 and 2010), as
well as examples that connect to SQL Server databases. You’ll also see forms that work with
SharePoint data located in remote locations on intranets and the Internet.As every developer knows, it’s important to understand what you’re creating and programming from
the application standpoint. In this book, I’ve chosen a simple example that I hope any business or
developer can relate to. More important, in this or any book you must relate to it successfully in
order to learn. When developing systems, you often find yourself analyzing applications that you
don’t have a lot of experience with. In a book such as the Microsoft Access 2010 Bible, it helps to have a
relatively simple database that illustrates database design and implementation principles.Many of the examples in this book use a fictitious company named Collectible Mini Cars (CMC).
Collectible Mini Cars sells model cars, trucks, and other vehicles to retailers and consumers. The
example database contains the necessary tables, queries, forms, reports, and module code to facili-
tate CMC’s business needs.Not every example described in this book’s chapters is taken from the Collectible Mini Cars data-
base. I used whatever example I had or could devise that best illustrates the concepts presented in
each chapter. As with real-life database development, this book uses a number of different database
designs, each with an important message for Access developers.Note
Within this guide I use some terms that haven’t been thoroughly explained yet. Feel free to skip over them and
return to this guide often as you start new chapters that use these forms and reports.Tip
Although professional developers will always split program and data objects into two separate database files,
it’s a common development practice to combine all the objects into one database and split them when devel-
opment is nearing completion. When you’re working in a front-end database and you’re linked to your data
file, you must load the back-end database file before you can make changes to the table design. You’ll learn
more about this in several places in this book.03_475348-flast.indd xli03_475348-flast.indd xli 4/1/10 1:43 PM4/1/10 1:43 PM