Microsoft® Office Access 2003 Inside Out

Setting Table Design Options

Now that you understand the basic mechanics of defining tables in your desktop database, it’s useful to take a look at a few options you can set to customize how you work with tables in Design view. Close any open tables so that all you see is the Database window. From the Tools menu, choose Options to take a look at all the custom settings offered.

You can find the first options that affect table design on the General tab, as shown in Figure 4-36. One option that I highly recommend you use is four-digit year formatting. When you set four-digit year formatting, Access displays all year values in date/time formats with four digits instead of two. This is important because when you see a value (in two-digit medium date ...