Microsoft (MS) Access is a great tool for helping you to keep on the ball regarding facts and figures generated by your company. If you regularly use the software you have the advantage that the newest information is at your fingertips and can be easily located in its databases. So if you need to attend a meeting to discuss the latest sales figures from your department or perhaps you are required to find the updated address of a client, Access can help you accomplish your goals. Many computer users are likely to be aware of the benefits that MS Access and MS Excel can have for businesses as both programmes can hold a large amount of important data.

However, in order to compile vast quantities of different kinds of documents that can be easily updated you may prefer to use MS Access and possibly embark on a training course that can show you the great functions offered by this product. Databases are now a common way to put all the necessary information in one location on your computer. No longer do you have to search for a customer's address in one table and their previous orders in another.

This programme allows you to put this altogether and if you wish to add other files, such as videos and photos, you are free to do so. Once you have created an MS Access database it is unlikely that you will leave it on your computer without making alterations to information you have inputted. Despite the type of files you have included in your document, you are sure to find that they can be updated in an instant.

For example, if a number of your clients have changed their shipping address and orders, the programme enables you to alter these details quickly by entering them directly into text boxes and data sheets or by creating queries. There are many different types of information you can merge together in databases including numbers, text and dates. These specific fields mean that you can make it impossible to write text in boxes that are meant to contain dates, for example, which can help bring more accuracy and speed to the updating process.

If you need to make more than a few changes to you databases you might like to instead create update queries. These are an excellent way of bringing the information held in your files up to speed. You may be tasked with changing product orders from all clients in a particular country.

Here, you could easily use the programme to identify all records that contain the word France. Once they have been called up you can then use the Design Tab's inbuilt Update function to make changes to the desired fields in one simple step. This saves you the need to individually go through each record of clients in order to alter data.

As well as changing the records help on your files in order to keep then updated, you can also quickly make mass additions to your database. As your business grows and you attract new customers and orders for your services, you may want to add contact details of these new clients in one block rather than entering addresses and phone numbers individually. You can do this by creating an append query, which can be used to collect information from other databases, ensuring your files are kept updated.