Introduction

An important part of creating your own database is field design. How you design your fields determines how accurately they will be able to store data. Microsoft Office Access 2003 provides flexibility and control in field design. You can design fields so that they allow you to:

• Assign a data type so the field accepts and displays the data in the appropriate format.

• Include input masks that guide users during data entry.

• Specify whether data must be entered into certain fields.

• Include a default value for a field.

• Include validation checks to ensure that correct data is entered.

• Accommodate data whose values are taken from lookup lists.

By taking advantage of these tools during the database design stage, you can save yourself and your database users a lot of trouble later on. By properly designing your fields, you can remove many sources of data-entry error and make your database simpler to manage.