Using Wizards to create forms, reports and queries

In Microsoft Access, there are over 50 wizards that guide you through various processes and operations. Here we will look at three. They take much of the hard work of designing and creating forms, reports and queries.

Wizard / Description
Form Wizard / Creates a new database form
Report Wizard / Creates a report that is based on a database table or query
Simple Query Wizard / Creates a database select query from the fields that you pick

Form Wizard

You can use the Form Wizard to create a new form as follows:

1In the Database window, click Forms under Objects.

2Double-click Create new form by using wizard.

If the resulting form doesn’t look the way you want, you can change it in Design view.

Sample screens generated by the Microsoft Access form wizard are shown below:

Report Wizard

To use the Report Wizard to create a report:

  1. In the Database window, click Reports under Objects.
  2. Double-click Create report by using wizard.

If the resulting form doesn’t look the way you want, you can change it in Design view.

Sample screens generated by the Microsoft Access form wizard are shown below:

Simple Query Wizard

Query Wizards do all the basic work for you after you provide answers to a series of questions. Even if you’ve created many queries, you may want to use a wizard to quickly design the query.

The Simple Select Query Wizard creates queries that retrieve data from the fields you specify in one or more tables or queries. If you want, the wizard can also sum, count, and average values for groups of records or all records, and it can calculate the minimum or maximum value in a field. However, you can’t limit the records it retrieves by setting criteria.

To use the Query Wizard:

1In the Database window, click Queries under Objects.

2Double-click Create query by using wizard.

If the resulting query isn’t exactly what you want, you can re-run the wizard or change the query in Design view.

Shown below are a series of screens resulting from building a query from an Autoshop database.

Use a database to meet organisational needs1