How To Open Up The Entity Relationship Diagram In Access

In this post, we show you how to open up the Entity Relationships Diagram in MS Access.

Creating relations between tables is a fundamental part of an Access database but trying to keep all those relations in mind can get a little confusing. Wouldn’t it be great if Access were able to provide us with some kind of visual representation of the data?

As it happens, Access contains its own (very useful) diagram to visualize relations between tables…

 

 

Click the Relationships button which can be found in the Relationships group of the Database Tools tab on the Ribbon.  The Relationships Tab In The Ribbon
You should see something like this. There might well be more tables in the database but some could have been hidden to make the diagram easier to read.  The Relationship Designer

So, what does it all mean?
The Relationship Designer Explained

1. The infinity sign represents the “Many” part of a relationship.
2. The “1” sign represents the “1” part of a relationship.
3. CourseTypeID is a Foreign Key of tblCourseType (not shown).
4. CourseID is a primary key as noted by the key symbol.
5. tblStudents and tblCourse are connected by a Many-to-Many relationship through a table called tblJctStudentsCourses.

It is worth mastering the Entity Relationships Diagram as it can help you to “see” the database in a new way.

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