By popular demand, we’ve decided to put together a set of topics that coaches & competitors in the Texas High School UIL Computer Applications contest should know in order to be competitive at state and regional levels.  This list of 10 topics will focus more on advanced formulas and applications of the programs than it will on basics (e.g. basic math formulas in Excel, letter formats and other Word templates, etc).  We covered the first item a while back in our blog post on IF statements…and conditional IF statements, SUMIF, COUNTIF, etc.  The second blog post introduced the second item: Using Times and Dates in Excel.  This time, we’re turning our attention to Access for #4: Select Queries & Query Basics.

The select query is the most basic of queries that you’ll use in Access. Select queries allow you to select different fields from one or more different Access tables in order to combine data from different flat data sets. Select queries also offer some of the same features that many types of Access queries sport: ability to filter on different fields (based upon field value or any stipulated criteria), ability to hide/show included output fields in output date, ability to sort output table by any of the included columns, use of ‘Group By’, etc.

We created a video on query basics and select queries this year (previewable below) that will walk you through the nuts and bolts of queries and select queries. In the video, you’ll learn about how queries work, how to create queries, how to add and remove tables and queries, how to add or remove fields from queries, hiding and showing fields in query outputs, basic filters and criteria, sorting/ordering query output results, using the group by feature, understanding when and how to use ‘where’ with group by, etc:

This video along with 4 others that cover make table queries, append queries, delete queries, update queries and crosstab queries in Microsoft Access is also available in a discounted bundle through our comprehensive five-video series on queries and query basics in Microsoft Access.