Allow a period in a table field name

[escapades_access]

I would like to enter data for every meter and half meter along a transect but ACCESS won't allow a period as a field name/column header. I just need 0, 0.5, 1, 1.5, 2, 2.5 and so on. Any way to bypass this weird rule in ACCESS??



Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks

[pbaldy]

I don't know of a way, but it doesn't seem weird to me. The period is used in table/field references, like TableName.FieldName, so a period in either name would be a problem. You can use an underscore: 1_5

[ajetrumpet]

a period in either name would be a problem.

Paul, would the brace still stop it?

[table.name].[field]

just curious. I didn't answer for a reason.

[pbaldy]

Generally you would think that would work, but in my testing Access will not let you include a period in either a table or field name. It errors as soon as you try.

[ajetrumpet]

Generally you would think that would work, but in my testing Access will not let you include a period in either a table or field name. It errors as soon as you try.

Interesting. Thanks for the test. I figured you'd do it out of curiosity.

[escapades_access]

Thanks guys, I suppose I'll use an underscore. Sure is inconvenient though. Thanks again, m

[craigcolahan]

escapades I completely agree. Why can we not use a period in data collection? How will a graph plot data without a period? One cannot plot a graph with underscores, that's completely stupid (and weird). I can't believe MicroSoft didn't think to allow scientific numbers with decimal places to be recorded in Access so data can be plotted graphically. Fail.

[pbaldy]

You can have periods in the data, just not in a field name.

[craigcolahan]

You can have periods in the data, just not in a field name.

The inability of MS Access to allow a period within a field within a table, means that for example, multiple combo boxes within a Form cannot reference one single table.

Working example: A student's science project. Different temperature readings for different cities over a 30 day period. It would be desirable for MS Access to allow periods (decimals) in fields within tables, so that one table could be constructed (containing a range of temperatures from say 0 to 50 in 0.1 steps) and the different cities within a form could reference this one table. But MS Access doesn't allow periods in fields. So as best as I can figure out, one has to type out 500 times for each city in the form, e.g. 0.1, 0.2, 0.3 etc...49.8, 49.9, 50.0!

I will gladly eat humble pie if I'm shown how this process can be made simpler. Until such time, missed opportunity for MS Access and an epic fail in data collection for science investigation.

[pbaldy]

Proper normalization would argue against having fields with values like that anyway (similar to having fields for January, February, etc). It would be pretty easy to add records with those values programmatically with a For/Next loop.