Introduction

A query is a description of the records you want to retrieve from a database. As the name implies, a query helps answer specific questions about the information in your database—for example, "Which customers have placed orders in the last six months?" or "Who sent us greeting cards over the holidays in the last two years?" The description of the records you want to retrieve identifies the names of the fields and the values they should contain; this description is called the selection criteria. With a Microsoft Office Access 2003 query you can:

• Focus on only the information you need by displaying only a few fields from a large table.

• Apply functions and other expressions to fields to arrive at calculated results.

• Add, update, or delete records in tables; or create entirely new tables.

• Summarize and group values from one table and display the result in a table.

• Save a query definition that Access will treat as a table for the purpose of creating forms and reports.

• Retrieve information stored in multiple tables, even if the tables are not open.