access-training-courses - Input Mask

Hi Rajeev

Input mask is something that many people are not clear on sometimes even having attended the Access training. This is mainly due to all these strange symbols and characters that form a part of the input mask.

There are mainly three sections of an input mask and they are separated by ;

The first section before the first ; is which what defines the mask itself. so in your case if (999)999-9999 was for a telephone number then it will take that appearance.

The reason you chose 9 instead of a 0 is because in some telephone nos. there might not be an entry required.

But if you wanted an entry to be mandatory then you would have used 0 instead of the 9.

similarly if you wanted the user to enter and alphabet character then you would have used L (please remember that this will be mandatory for the user to enter). However if you want you can use ? to allow the user to enter alphabet characters but then the entry is not mandatory!

NOW COMING TO YOUR MAIN QUESTION:
the second section that appears after the second ; is there to tell Access if the literal characters (such as Brackets or parentheses and dashes). 0 will store the characters and 1 will only store the data without the dashes or brackets within your table.

Third section is telling Access what symbol would you like to display before the user starts entering the data. so in your case if it says "#" what the user will see in the data sheet view is (###)###-####

If you wanted the field to remain blank then simply enter ; "" in the third section.

I hope this has helped!!

Thank you

Kindest Regards

Rajeev Rawat