Access Rookie here

Hey, I have a few questions. Hopefully requiring short answers. hehe. I'm assisting on this research paper for a professor here at UCSD, and I'm doing a literature review at the moment, and collecting articles, and I'm required to enter the info of these articles into Microsoft Access, what is expected of this database is to be used as a search engine.

I have made a table, a query, a report, and a form
My question is:
How do I make a search engine template?? What I want... is for a form to pop up on Access, and it has spaces where you can enter Author, Title, etc... and then you have to enter a "search" button or something, and it'll try to find that Article in the database, and bring it up as a report. Is this possible????

In addition, can I just conjur up a simple, straight-forward Form where I can also Enter info of new articles into the table?

I hope this makes sense. Any help would be MUCH appreciated. Thanks.


  • It has been a while since I used Access, but all that you want to do can be done with a little vba. I am not good with forms. I hate forms, but I like code. So, here is a high level overview of what you want to do.

    1. Make a form (or better yet, a web page with some type of scripting i.e. ColdFusion or ASP) that will have the fields you want to search on.

    2. After the button is pressed, (if you are still using forms! HINT use ASP!) you will need to generate a query off of the populated fields. This is not hard. It may require a little reading if you are new to VBA (or ASP).

    3. Submit that query and return the results.

    I realize that this a pretty vague, but it is not too hard. I really recommend using some sort of scripting tool like CF or ASP (or if you are real adventurous, PHP!).

  • Awesome! Thanks for the reply. I'll give it a try here pretty soon. Thank you.

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