Good morning.

I am using Access 2003 and have a table with 200+ fields. I would like to alphabetize the field names to make them easier to find and work with. Can this be done?

Welcome to Utter Access!

That is a lot of fields! I'm not sure what you mean by finding and working with the fields but you can always create queries to reorder thing in Access.

Can you explain a bit more of what you are actually having problems with?

Welcome to UA! -o!

Your question leads me to believe that you are using Access as a flat spreadsheet
This isn't the correct way to utilize Access.


I would suggest reading through the articles below, and then come back with your questions so we can
help you get your project going on the right foot.(IMG:http://www.utteraccess.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/sad.gif)

• Microsoft Knowledge Base 283878: Description of the database normalization basics
• Noah's FAQ on Normalization
• Jerry's FAQ on Normalization
• GroverParkGeorge's PDF on Normalization
• Database Answers (free models)
• Microsoft Knowledge Base 234208: Understanding Relational Database Design
• Database planning tutorial Part I
• Database planning tutorial Part II
• argeedblu's FAQ on Design Strategies

Regards,
cynthia

I second Cynthia response. In my years of building databases I have never seen a table with 200 fields in it that was normalized. Read through some of the links Cynthia provided and if you would like, strip sensitive data out of a copy of your db and post your db here and we can take alook at it and help you get your structure normalized so you can use your db more efficiently.

J

P.S. As for alphabetizing your fields, I don't know of anyway to go about that without manually going down through and moving them up and down to the right order manually :(

Thanks for the welcome everybody.

I'm actually involved in two projects right now. My day job involves the maintenance of a large legacy system. I am also in the planning stage for a smaller DB for my own use.

This question is re: the legacy system. I actually believe the table to be normalized, but will read over the articles you suggest and make sure. Either way the table should probably be split up, but I don't see that happening at the moment. It's too firmly established and there are too many other projects on the burner. Given the size of the table I was hoping to reorganize the fields so that I can find them more easily. I will probably either live with the situation or do what Jason suggests and sort the fields by hand.

As an aside, my other project is a DB to support a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) garden that I have started as a side business. That project is being a lot of fun.

Thanks,

Allan