In this topic we are going to discuss what a Database is. A database is a collection of records organized for a specific purpose. In some sense Word documents and Excel spreadsheets organize records. Outlook is also in some ways a database. The contacts you see in Outlook are a collection of records that provide information about each person.
Go to your Project Files folder, Part I, Lesson 01 and open up the Employee List Word document. As you see on screen here, I have a sample list of employees, we have an Employee Number, Last Name, First Name, Middle Initial and an Address. If I scroll down you see I have quite a few employees here. It's only one page and it only has a little bit of information about each employee but if you think about it this is a database, it is a simple list. I know it maybe hard to think of Word as a database but remember it does fit our definition. On screen we have a collection of records organized for a specific purpose. We have a simple list of employees.
I am going to close Word now and I am going to open the Vendor List spreadsheet inside the Project Files folder Part 1, Lesson 01. As you see on your screen here this Vendor List spreadsheet has a lot of vendors listed here. Vendor Name Customer Information, we have addresses for your vendors, we have Contact Information. Below our Vendor List -- I am going to scroll down a little bit, you are going to see our Invoice Information. We have the Vendor name, Invoice Date, Invoice Number, Invoice Amount and we have some Breakdown by report group.
Over here on the right you see Sub-Amounts, Account Numbers. As I scroll further down you are going to see quite a few invoices here. For a small business this type of spreadsheet may suffice just fine. We only have a few invoices. But what if you are a large business? What if you have 100s of vendors for your spreadsheet? What if you have millions of invoices? You can see that you are quickly going to outgrow Excel in terms of a database system.
Right now for this example we just have a few invoices here. So it works. But when you start getting into large businesses, you are definitely going to need a relational database system. So what do I mean when I say relational database system? We could probably do an entire series on a relational database system, but for what you need to know a relational database system organizes data into tables. Now what do I mean when I say a table? A table represents an entity in the real world. It could be an employee, a vendor, an invoice, an appointment a CD. So in the relational database system all of this information is organized into tables and all of this information relates to one another in terms of relations that you can define within Access.
Excel does not have this capability nor does Word, nor does Outlook. So what we are going to discover in our next few topics and lessons is how to build the database and answers our questions in terms of getting the business rules that we need defined and following through with our information to get everything correct.
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