Tables   -    Field properties

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It's good practice to further define your fields as opposed to going with the defaults. To assign properties to fields, look to the area at the bottom of the table design view, as seen in Table.3 Field Properties. Listed below are some of the typical field properties along with a description of each. If you need a further description of the field properties, hit the F1 key to open Access's help file on the selected field property. Field Properties and Descriptions Field size The length of the Text and Number data types. Format The way the data is displayed or printed can be controled--the format will depend upon the data type Decimal places Only used for the Number and Currency data types Input mask User can define the exact input mask for the fields for the the Text, Number, Date/Time, and Currency data types. Caption The text that appears here will be displayed in the status bar, form labels, and report headings Default value A value that will be defaulted to except for the OLE Object and Autonumber data types Validation rule A rule can be created to determine the validity of the data entry in Text and Number entries OLE Objects Types of data that can be created by OLE server applications (i.e. MS Word document) Validation rule A rule can be created to determine the validity of the data entry in Text and Number entries Validation text Text that will be shown when the data entered does not pass the validation rule Required When set to "Yes" this field requires input and will not allow it to be empty Allow zero length Can set the field to a zero length string for Text and Memo fields Indexed For Text, Number, Date/Time, Currency and Autonumber data types, and index can be built to speed up access to the data values

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