Access 2007 Tutorials Series 2: Importing and Querying Data
The Federal Elections Commission has an enormous amount of public data that we can download and manipulate in Access. I use this as an example in my classes because even though the data model is really simple (six data columns across two tables), there are many different ways to examine the data and at least one interesting little discovery in the data that is revealed at the end of the second video.
I think the availability of this data is a sticky issue. The purpose of campaign finance reform, as I understand it, is to add a layer of transparency to the funding of political campaigns. Obviously, money has a presence in the political process and that presence seems to outweigh the anonymous personal vote. Yet, often as not, it seems that the political candidates we are presented with are selected by the media and major party structures... structures that are hardly in any way transparent. I am personally part of an FEC dataset, just not this one, and I recall watching the television news on Super Tuesday and knowing how my candidate performed by looking at the percentages that weren't accounted for. Even though he placed third in one state and tied for second in another, the media refused to mention his name even while mentioning the names of candidates he displaced.
If you find this to be an interesting topic, be sure to watch the fantastic documentaries SPIN by Bryan Springer (as available on Google Video) and the documentary Ralph Nader: An Unreasonable Man.
In this video, Access 2007 Tutorial 2.1. Importing Data:
- Comma Delimited Files (CSV)
- Importing Data from Excel
- Import Spreadsheet Wizard
- Table Analyzer
- Lookup Fields versus Foreign Keys
In this video, Access 2007 Tutorial 2.2. Queries and Group By:
- Query Design
- Setting Query Criteria
- Using Grouping Functions:
- Group By
- Sum
- Average
- Count
- Hiding Criteria Fields
- SQL View