Help with Access - Having trouble with joins

[steelcurtain11]

I'm having trouble with an Access assignment in class. I'm able to get started on the problems, but when it comes to the joining of tables in the database, that's when I start to get confused. It's just an intro database class, so we haven't learned too much stuff yet, but the professor who teaches it is kind of hard to learn from, and I've had no luck asking for help.

One of the questions asks to join 2 tables into one.. each is for a different group of people with all separate first,last names, and phone numbers.. but they connect to each other through about 4 different other tables, and not directly. I've managed to get all the info I needed up on a single table from those two (first name, last name, phone) but they all show up as (A Lastname, A firstname, A phone, B lastname, Bfirstname, Bphone) instead of just Lastname, Firstname, Phone. I'm having trouble figuring out the INNER, LEFT, RIGHT, and FULL joins as the powerpoint we got for notes is VERY vague.. blah


Sorry if this is confusing, I'm not even sure how to explain myself without talking to someone directly.

But if anyone would be willing to help me, that'd be great. I can offer a more in depth explanation via PM. (I'm not looking to get my homework done for me, just to get past this bump with joins so I can move on. I just have 3 problems I'm stuck on)

[alansidman]

I think this is a good explanation

http://www.databasedev.co.uk/query_joins.html

[steelcurtain11]

Thank you for that. I'm not sure if I'm just not seeing it on there, but for one of my questions it asks me to "Write a SQL statement to show the article title of all unpublished articles over 2000 words (Hint: articles not listed in the Published table)." There's an Articles table that lists every article and then a Published table that lists only the articles that were published. I'm unsure of how to select the data from Articles that Doesn't appear in Published.. I can figure out how to select the data that appears in Both Articles and Published, but not the other way..