In this post, we explain what the different data types in MS Access mean.
Here are a list of data types in MS Access.
| Text (2013 Short Text) | A String 0 to 255 characters long. |
| Memo (2013 Long Text) | A String up to 64,000 characters long. |
| Number | A Number holds numbers. You will be safe using Long and Single.There are six types: byte, integer, decimal, long, single and double.
Byte, integer and long cannot hold fractions. |
| Date/Time | Holds dates and times. |
| Currency | A number field designed for Currencies and floating point precision numbers. |
| AutoNumber | A special Long number. Access can change this field automatically and is designed to be used as a Primary Key field. |
| Yes/No | A Boolean field and may be Yes/No, On/Off or True/False |
| OLE Object | For string BLOBs – binary large objects. |
| Hyperlink | Contains hyperlink text. It has the additional functionality that being clicked will activate the link within. |
| Attachment | May contain 0, 1 or many files. This provides a convenient and more efficient way to store OLE Objects. |
Typical data types
AutoNumber for the ID field of a table. Auto-generating an incrementing number is great when you need to give your rows of data unique identifiers (which is almost always).
Text for Address. It is typical to use text fields to maintain alpha-numeric characters (letters and non-calculatable numbers) such as those used in addresses.
Date/Time for Date Of Birth. We hope this is obvious…
Number fields for Quantities. If you have a database that is required to store sales information, you will need to use the number field. Using the number field means that when we want to perform aggregations on the data (reports, invoices), we can do.
Trick question alert!
What about telephone numbers?
Text field (not number). As we don’t need to perform a calculation on a telephone number we would store it as a text field!
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