Field Name Captions

[Paul H]

I just came across this today. In my many years of using Access I have never used or knew about Field Name captions till I started working with a smart, but inexperienced Access user/developer on a database she is trying to build. I found it very unnerving when I looked in a table and couldn't find the field name I was looking for. This strikes me as a very bad idea, but you may feel differently. She's been using a lot of wizards and I guess this was helping her in some way. Maybe I'm to old and set in my ways, but I would never do this. Is this something you would recommend against?

[ranman256]

I caption all the time. No problems.

[Paul H]

I must have missed class that day.

[andy49]

And crucial for attachment fields


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Micron]

It's commonly done so that field names can follow proper naming convention but display spaces. I don't see why you couldn't use special characters as well, but I don't recall ever doing that in a caption. If memory serves, a long time ago it was the only way to show sensible column names in a data sheet although now you can set a data sheet field caption in the property sheet. Then again, the old grey matter ain't what it used to be...

[HiTechCoach]

TIP: The caption is also used as the control's label when adding a control to a form or report.

[CJ_London]

I develop for many clients - some of them have suppliers, some have vendors. Others may have staff or employees etc.

Using the caption property means I have one table design and I just change the caption to suit the client. Also useful for foreign clients.

Main benefit however is no spaces in field names - and when importing from something like excel to a new table, field names are stripped of spaces, special characters etc, whilst the original name is stored in the caption. Requires a bit of jiggery pokery around matching names on subsequent imports, but all doable and everyone is happy.

I also use the caption property as a kind of flag - if a field does not have a caption, then it is deemed a 'system' field and not displayed to the user in a form.