MS Access —

Adding a Caption

Think of the as a field's pseudonym or stage name. When you create forms and reports, Access uses the field's Field Name as the field's heading. When you add a caption to a field, however, it appears as the heading for the field instead of the field name.

Captions are useful when you want to provide more detailed headings for your field names. For example, instead of displaying the rather ambiguous DOB field name, you could add a more meaningful "Date of Birth" caption to the DOB field to make your forms and reports easier to read and understand. The original DOB field name is not affected in any way.

Figure 4-9. Adding a caption to a field.

Figure 4-10. The same fields with and without .

This lesson explains how to add a Caption to a field.

  1. Click the View button on the toolbar to open the table in Design view.

    The tblCustomers table contains two unclearly labeled fields that could use captions: the DOB (date of birth) and SSN (social security number) fields. You probably already know the first step by now click the name of the field where you want to add the caption.

  2. Click the DOB field.

    Now you can add a more meaningful caption to the DOB field that will appear as the field's heading.

  3. Click the Caption box in the Field Properties section and type Date of Birth.

    Your table should look like Figure. Now let's add a caption to the SSN field.

  4. Click the SSN field, click the Caption box in the Field Properties section, and type Social Security No.

    Let's see how the new captions look.

  5. Click the Save button on the toolbar to save your changes, then click the View button to display the table in Datasheet view.

    You will need to scroll to the right to see the captions. Second figure shows the same fields with and without captions.

How to add a caption to a field:

  1. make sure the table is displayed in design view.

  2. click the field you want to add a caption to.

  3. click the caption box in the field properties section and type the caption.