In MS Access what is a criteria cell used for?

Answer 1

To extract data that fulfil a specific set of requirements. So you could have a list of people, but you don't want all of them shown in certain situations. Some of the criteria you could have would be that you only want to show females, or people who live in a certain town, or people above a certain age, or people who work in a certain department or a product that has had sales over a certain amount. You decide what you want and then apply the criteria to the field or fields you want, in the criteria cell.

So if you want the people working in a certain department you would include the field that has the name of the departments people work in as part of the query. Then, under the field that has that data, you would put in the department you want in the criteria cell. It must be in the correct cell. So for example, there is no point putting criteria relating to their department in the field that shows their surname or their wages.

If you have a field for department and you are looking for people that work in the Sales department, then in the criteria cell under the department field, you would put Sales. It will automatically put quotation marks around it if it is a text field, but don't worry about that. Assuming you have the field for the names of the people, when you run the query it will show all people who work in the Sales department.