Creating a Phone Book with Microsoft Access

As with all applications within the Microsoft Office suite, Access is a powerful and easy to implement program which can be used to effectively manage your data. Whether a completely paperless office will ever exist or not is open to speculation, but there’s no denying that we’re increasingly moving in that direction.

In the world of commerce, losing important contact details can be catastrophic. Scrabbling around in drawers looking for a crucial business card, without which a project will simply grind to a halt, can be a terrifying prospect. Even in our personal lives we’ve seen our list of phone numbers almost double over the last couple of decades as people have steadily acquired mobiles. Whichever way you look at it, the age of paper phone books is slowly drawing to a close (according to the Local Government Association, unwanted copies of the Yellow Pages create 75,000 tons of waste paper annually).

There are plenty of ways to store such information electronically – you could just type a long list in a Word document, for instance. However, this is not nearly the most functional or efficient method.

Excel and Access are perhaps the best tools for the job, and today we’re going to look at how you can use the latter to create an electronic phone book.

For the purposes of this tutorial we’re going to assume you are using Microsoft Access 2007. If you have a different version of the application, there may be some subtle variations between the programs but the fundamentals remain the same.

Step by Step: Creating an Access Phone Book

As with many of the Office applications, you’ll be no doubt pleased to hear that Access does most of the hard work for you. There is a template for precisely the task we’re about to undertake together, and it couldn’t be simpler to perform. Read on however, and we’ll run you through each step in detail. You’ll need to be connected to the Internet to follow the template wizard.

- Open Access (this should be under the Start menu in the Microsoft Office tab)

- When Access opens, you’ll be faced with the Getting Started window in which you should see the Featured Online Templates section. Here you’ll be able to select the Contacts option. This lets Access know that we are looking to download a template with editable contact information.

- Before hitting the Download button, choose a name for your phone book. Once this is done a new window titled Getting Started with Contacts will open – feel free to watch the videos giving you more information on the process, or close it and move on to the next step.

- Now we get to the data entry portion of the task at hand. Click on New Contact which will produce a Contact Detail window with a variety of tabs. If you’re not there already, select the General tab. From here we can put in contact details for each individual we wish to archive, including addresses and phone numbers.

Don’t feel that you have to create two separate databases for both work and home – you’ll notice at the bottom of the window that you can specify whether a contact is for personal or professional use. Afterwards, you can filter your search for either when searching through your phone book. With this system, you can keep the addresses and contact numbers of your family members in the same place as your colleagues’ details.

- After completing the first lot of details, select Save and New. This will give you a fresh Contact Detail window in which you can repeat the last step for as many times as necessary. Once you’re finished added contacts, hit Save and Close.

- You can now specify how you want your contacts appear in the database by utilizing the column headings. Typically, your contacts will be displayed in alphabetical order by name.

Five minutes later, and you’re done! Hit Phone Book to finalize the database and take a look. You can search through your new contacts database using the Access control panel, quickly jumping to the exact person you need without having to flip through a notepad or rolodex. In fact, now you’ve got everything safely backed up on the computer you can delight in chucking all those hastily-written scraps of paper in the bin. One less piece of clutter on the desk is always worth a few minutes of your time!

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