Hands-On Procedure
Having been tasked
with a need representative of many that occur in the business world, we will
leverage the new MS Office Access 2003 option to view object dependencies.
Within this capability, we will find that we can see an inventory list of the
objects, consisting of tables, queries, reports and forms that exist within the
database. Within the list, we can select a given object, and then have MS
Access display a list of all objects that depend upon the object we have
selected. In addition, we can produce a similar list that displays the objects
upon which our selected object itself depends.
First, we will access
the database and discuss the setting I mentioned earlier, in preparation for
our hands-on practice with using the valuable new capability to view object
dependencies in MS Access.
Preparation
Let's
access the Northwind database and make any preparation necessary to satisfy the
business need we have outlined above. We will begin by starting MS Access 2003
and taking the following steps:
1.
Go to the Start
button on the PC, and then navigate to the Microsoft Access icon, as we
did in Create a Calculated Field with the
Expression Builder, the first article in my MS Access series.
2.
Click the icon
to start MS Access.
MS
Access opens, and may display the initial dialog. If so, close it.
3.
Select File
-> Open from the top menu, and navigate
to the Northwind sample database. (The file might also be accessed from
the Open a File menu atop the task pane, if it has not been disabled
previously, at the right side of the main window.)
4.
Select Northwind.mdb.
We are
greeted with the standard Security Warning dialog, depicted in Illustration
1, indicating that we are about to open a file containing potentially
malicious code.
Illustration 1: Security
Warning Dialog in MS Access 2003
The
splash screen may appear.
NOTE: As we have noted earlier in the
series, we can preclude the appearance of the splash screen each time we enter
the sample Northwind database by checking the "Don't show this
screen again." checkbox. For now, we will leave it unchecked.
The
splash screen disappears, and is replaced by the Main Switchboard.
7.
Click the Display
Database Window, shown circled in Illustration 2.
Illustration 2: Inside
Access, Northwind Main Switchboard
We
arrive at the Database Window, which appears as depicted in Illustration
3. Here we can view dependency information for many MS Access objects (we
will discuss exclusions shortly) that are open, or that we select in the Database
window.
Illustration 3: The
Database Window
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