Office 2007 Bible

Working with Fields

There are times when you want to work with the fields you’ve already selected—rearranging their order, inserting a new field, or deleting an existing field. You may even want to add a field to the QBE grid without showing it in the datasheet. Adding a field without showing it enables you to sort on the hidden field, or to use the hidden field as criteria.

Selecting a field in the QBE grid

Before you can move a field’s position, you must first select it. To select it, you will work with the field selector row.

The field selector row is the narrow gray area at the top of each column in the QBE grid at the bottom of the Query Designer. Recall that each column represents a field. To select the Category field, move the mouse pointer until a small selection arrow (in this case, a dark downward arrow) is visible in the selector row and then click the column. Figure 36-11 shows the selection arrow above the Category column just before it is selected.

Figure 36-11. Selecting a column in the QBE grid. The pointer changes to a downward-pointing arrow when you move over the selection row.

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Tip

Select multiple contiguous fields by clicking the first field you wish to select and then dragging across the field selector bars of the other fields.

Changing field order

The left-to-right order in which fields appear in the QBE grid determines the order ...