Access 2016 for Beginners Part 13: Adding Numeric Fields to an Access Database

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This Microsoft Access 2016 training tutorial video is the fourth part of the Tables chapter of this course. We will be adding numeric fields such as duration days and prices in our tour database.
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Welcome back to our course on Access 2016.
We’ve been setting up the fields in the trip table in the Esprit de Tour database. And in this final section on setting up the fields we’re going to add the remaining ones which are all numeric. The first of these is going to be the duration of the trip in days. So first of all I’m going to call this field DurationDays. The default data type as always is Short Text but on this occasion this is going to be numeric. So I’m going to change that to Number. We now have a bit of a quandary because depending on how much you know about the way that numbers are stored in computers in general, in Microsoft Office or even in Access you may or may not be able to choose a number field size.
Now if I click down at the first property in Field Properties there’s a little dropdown there. It says, Byte or integer or long integer or single. You may have no idea what each of those are and you may have no idea which of those will be most suitable for storing the duration of a trip in days. Now the information you need is embedded in the Access Help. But there isn’t one simple place to find it which fully explains I think everything that you need to know. So I’m going to take you to two places in Access Help that will be of assistance to you in this.
So first of all let’s open up Access Help and let’s go to Design Tables and one of the options there is Data Types. And this explains in pretty good terms all of the data types in Access. So for instance short text holds alphanumeric data, names, titles, etcetera up to 255 characters. We’ve used that one quite a bit already. Long text, large amounts of alphanumeric data, sentences and paragraphs. And as I said in the previous section up to about a gigabyte of data but controls to display a long text are limited to the first 64,000 characters. So all of the data types that are supported are in this list. It’s very helpful. But when you get to numeric data it rather unhelpfully says, Numeric data 1, 2, 4, 8, or 16 bytes. Now even if you know how many bytes you need to store the duration of a trip in days whether you can translate that to the names in that dropdown list I just showed you is another question. So in order to work out the name of the numeric type that you need you need to go to another place in the Access Help.
And in order to find it the way I always remember it is that I search on conversion. And the first item that you find there is Type Conversion Functions. Now believe me you don’t need to know anything about type conversion functions but if you go down into that topic it explains those different numbers and what range each of them can store. So it tells you that a byte can store from zero to 255. If we used byte to store the duration in days of a trip our longest trip could be 255 days. Now that’s not bad actually. That’s what, about eight or nine months? Something like that. However we may ultimately have longer trips than that so maybe we should go for the next size up if you like. And the next size up is integer. An integer can store numbers in the range minus-32,768 to plus-32,767. Now a 32,767 day trip is a long trip.
You’re getting on towards a hundred years. I doubt whether many people will be going on trips that long. So integer looks like the type to go for.
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