Microsoft Access 2010 Tutorials
Working with Tables / Input Masks
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Subtitles of the Movie (Microsoft Access 2010 / Working with Tables / Input Masks)
Now let's talk about Input Masks and how we can use those to help us around issues like we're going to run into with this Phone field. We can require it, and I'm going to switch to Design View, and you're going to notice that on the Phone field we have required that something be put there. But now we need to control what is put there, OK? And so, what we're going to do is create an Input Mask for this field. So the first thing we do is click on the field and then come down to Input Mask. And you're going to notice, as soon as I click on Input Mask, it gives me this little ellipsis button out here to the right and I just click on that. And notice, how cool is this, they have some formats already built for you. And notice, to see how it looks you can use the Try It box. And so, if I click on Phone number and go to Try It, notice it is telling them that I need to see parentheses, three spaces, close parentheses, a space, three characters, a dash, four characters, right? And notice I can edit this. I can do Social Security numbers, Zip codes, whatever. And then I can edit the list if I would like. And you can see this is what the Input Mask actually looks like. This is what the Placeholder looks like, and I won't dig too deep into this, but you can see what's going to happen here, OK? So we're going to tell it, we want to see a Phone number in this format and we will just click Finish, and so there is our Input Mask, OK? And so now, if we save our table, save the changes, and then we switch out to Datasheet View now let's input someone. So, we'll do a Student ID, an IID, and we will do Bob James. I don't know if that's the same name I used before. I won't put a Street, City, State, Zip, or Email, but I will put a Phone number in now, 615, and notice it is asking me to put it in the right form: 783 324. And now when I try to tab off, it's saying, wait a minute, Dude. What you just put in doesn't match my Input Mask. And I say, oh, OK. Wait a minute, yeah. I forgot to put the 7 on the end. And now when I tab over everything's cool. We have a record in, we can come back later and add our Street. But notice that Input Mask also forces it to look the same in every field, which is another problem which is called Data Consistency. And it is where some people put dashes in phone numbers, some don't, and so forth, and then when you try to pull the report later it just looks nasty, nasty being a Southern technical term for incorrect, nonstandard data. So, Input Masks are really cool. You can build your own. You can do all kind of cool stuff with this. We jump back out here, let me just show you one more time. Go back out and play with this, look at some of these things, and even kind of nerd out on this a little bit. Dig out on the Internet and see some of the cool custom Input Masks you can see if you don't like these, OK? So that's an Input Mask. This will help us keep our data, first of all correct and maintain data consistency, but also make sure that we have usable data in our tables.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Microsoft Access 2010 |
| Author: | Mark Long |
| SKU: | 34224 |
| ISBN: | 1-936334-91-7 |
| Release Date: | 2011-05-12 |
| Duration: | 9 hrs / 121 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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