July 2010
Beginner
956 pages
39h 22m
English
Content preview from Office 2010: The Missing ManualBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Chapter 26. Building Smarter Tables
In the previous chapter, you learned how to dish out databases and pop tables into them without breaking a sweat. However, there’s bad news. The tables you’ve been creating so far aren’t up to snuff.
Most significantly, you haven’t explicitly told Access what type of information you intend to store in each field of your table. A database treats text, numbers, dates, and other types of information differently. If you store numeric information in a field that expects text, then you can’t do calculations later on (like find the average value of your bobblehead dolls), and you can’t catch mistakes (like a bobblehead with a price value of “fourscore and twenty”).
To prevent problems like these, you need to define the data type of each field in your table. You’ll tackle that task in this chapter. Once you’ve mastered data types, you’re ready to consider some of the finer points of database design. Finally, you’ll also spend a few pages learning about a favorite pastime of seasoned database pros: keeping bad data out of your tables.
Understanding Data Types
All data is not created equal. Consider the Dolls table you created in the previous chapter. Its fields actually contain several different types of information:
Text. The Character and Manufacturer fields.
Numbers. The ID and PurchasePrice fields.
Dates. The DateAcquired field.
You may naturally assume that the PurchasePrice field always includes numeric content and that the DateAcquired field always includes ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.