If you have been following my blog since the beginning of this week you will have seen that I have been looking at action queries in Microsoft Access. These are queries that are using for changing the data sets such as adding data to them, deleting data and also archiving data.

Here is the last one of these which is the update query. Update queries in a way are a bit like find and replace but can do so much more. For a start you can get it to make changes to data based on specific criteria and allows you to do more than find and replace. It can also be used to update values, for example, a particular manufacturer may be increasing their prices by 10%, using an update query you could easily do this. Another example I have used before is when area codes changed for phone numbers, I used the update query to make that change to just part of the text.