I am also new to Access.<br><br>Relationships are important to bring together information, using queries, that you have separated in different tables. Three types: Inner Join, Left Outer Join and Right Outer Join.<br>When two or more tables are inner-joined, a query based on these tables fetches only those records that have the same information in the link fields. For example, two tables joined with a field StudentID of type Autonumber when queried upon, fetches only those records in either of the tables that have the same number say 28. <br>Table 1: StudentID, FirstName, LastName, Address, Phone#, E-mail.<br>Table 2: StudentID, CourseTaken, Grade, Professor.<br>Table 1 is on the 1 side of relationship and Table 2 is on the many side of the relationship. Referential integrity is enforced, which means that table 2 cannot have a studentID that is not listed in Table 1 (it does not make sense to have a student taking courses when the studen's names are not known, access protects against this.)There might be cases where new students are enrolled and their names and addresses etc. are listed in table 1. But they might not have taken any courses yet. When you query these two tables that are inner-joined (Join Type 1 in Join Options dialog box), only those students taking courses are listed; in other words, new students are not showed by the query.<br><br>These two tables are not good exmaples for Left and Right Outer joins. But anyway, Left Join means that all records from the parent table are listed and only those records from the child table are listed, in the query, that have the same value in the link field as the parent table. Right Outer Join means that all records from the child table are listed in the query but only those records from the parent table are listed whose link field has the same values as the link field in the child table. Hope this helps. Think about it and refer to a good source.