Chapter 2. Building Smarter Tables

2. Building Smarter Tables

• Understanding Data Types

• Design View

• Access Data Types

• The Primary Key

• Six Principles of Database Design

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. This is the central task you'll tackle in this chapter. Once you've mastered data types, you're ready to consider some of the finer points of database design.