Queries :: Calculation To Compare Different Records

I have created a mock employee database to work out kinks before I create the real one. One table has employee info (employeeID, name, address, email, phone numbers, etc.). The other table has "employee actions" with fields: employeeID, actiontype, salary, jobtype, jobtitle, jobhours, bonus, actiondate. Actiontypes are "hire", "salary change", "bonus", "leave". It is a little more complicated but that is irrelevant to my query question...

I created a query to show employee salary changes, amount and action date. I want to create a calculated field that shows the dollar change and percentage change from last salary to new salary. So the query involves multiple records or rows, which seems to be a black hole in terms of information on how to do this. If it were Excel, I would just do a quick nested function calculation and be done with it but with Access, where each record is independent of the others, how to calculate it. I know there must be a way to do this because otherwise, what good would an employee database be?

So the questions are: (1) can you do calculations (other than totals or counts) using multiple records/rows? and (2) if so, how do I do it? It seems I would have to do a a specific sort and it would not be easily updatable.