Add fields

As already mentioned in an earlier lesson, you can add fields to your table at any time .
We have already seen how to do this in “Datasheet View” in previous lessons.
We also have the ability to do this in “Design View”.

In this example, I will add a field to my “Album” table.
In this field, I will place a photo for the album.
That will give a little color, when I start my forms.

Of course, first you open the “Album” table.
In the “Home” tab, click the “View” button.
The “View” button consists of two parts, the upper part lets us navigate between “Datasheet View” and “Design View”.
The lower section opens a drop-down menu with the following options:
“Datasheet View”, “PivotTable View”, “PivotChart View” and “Design View”.
The options “PivotTable View” and “PivotChart View” will be discussed later.

Click on the upper part of the “View” button or select “Design View” in the drop-down list. How you do it does not matter.
In both the cases, this opens the “Design View”.
The “Design View” is divided into two parts.
In the upper part we have the field names, “Data type” of the field and a description.
The field names appear clear to me so, we set the “Data type” of the field in the ‘Ribbon’ in the “Design View”.
In the “Description”, you can enter some information about this field. This is purely informational.

In the lower part of the window, we have characteristics of the field that is selected in the upper part of the window.
The field properties are dependent on the selected “Data Type”.
We will see more about field properties in the next lesson.

Now, to add a field, place the cursor in the bottom field and type a field name.
In this case, “Photo”, because I want a picture of each album.
I choose the “Data type” as “Attachment”.
When we select “Attachment” as the “Data type”, we have only 2 field properties.
The first is “Caption”, is the text that wish to display instead of the “Photo” later in the form.
The second is “Required”, here you have two choices, Yes or No. If something MUST be entered select “Yes”, select “No” if it is not required.
Since I do not always have a picture of the album, I choose “No”.

If we now switch back to the “Datasheet View”, we see a dialog box stating that we must save the table first.
I click “Yes”.

As you can see the “Photo” appears with a paper clip.
Next to the paperclip,
we see a 0 in parentheses.
This means that there is no attachment selected for this record.
To add a photo to a record, double-click the paperclip. Or right-click the paper clip and select “Manage attachments …”.
This opens the “Attachments” dialog.
Click the “Add” button, navigate to the file you want to add. Select it and click the “Open” button.
If you want to add multiple attachments, click on the “Add” button again.

If you want to remove a photo, select the picture in the dialog box and click the “Delete” button.

Click the OK button when you’re done.
As you can see in the picture below, there is now a 1 next to the paperclip.
If you have added multiple attachments, the number is shown here.

You can not view this picture in “Datasheet View”.
For this, we need a form.
We use forms to view and enter data.
We will see more about forms in a later lesson.

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