THE ABSOLUTE MINIMUM

Access makes working with most objects easy through its wizards and other tools, but sometimes you just have to get under the hood and make things better. In this chapter, you learned about some of the things you can do in table design mode, including the following:

• How to control the data that goes into a field by carefully choosing the data type for the field

• How the caption and description properties of a field let you supply helpful information for users of your database

• How the input mask and format properties of a field let you control what data is entered and displayed

• How the validation rule and validation text properties of a field help you limit the data to acceptable values and how to show a friendly error message in case of any problems

• How indexes let Access find and sort data in your database more quickly