Microsoft Access 2010 Bible

Part I: Access Building Blocks

144

FIGURE 4.14

Resizing columns in the QBE grid

Resizing cursor

Removing a field

Remove a field from the QBE grid by selecting the field (or fields) and pressing the Delete key. You

can also right-click on a field’s selector bar and choose Cut from the shortcut menu.

Inserting a field

Insert new fields in the QBE grid by dragging a field from a Field List window in the tables pane

above the QBE grid and dropping it onto a column in the QBE grid. The new column is inserted to

the left of the column on which you dropped the field. Double-clicking a field in a Field List adds

the new column at the far-right position in the QBE grid.

Providing an alias for the field name

To make the query datasheet easier to read, you can provide aliases for the fields in your query. An

alias becomes the field’s heading in the query’s datasheet, but it doesn’t affect the field’s name or

how the data is stored and used by Access. Aliases are sometimes useful to help users better under-

stand the data returned by a query. As you can see in Chapter 18, data in queries are often trans-

formed by performing simple operations such as combining a person’s first and last name as a

single field. In these situations, aliases are very useful because they provide an easily recognizable

reference to the transformed data.

To follow along with this example, create a query using the fields from the tblProducts (refer to

Figure 4.13). Follow these steps to establish an alias for the ProductID and Description fields:

1. Click to the left of the P of the ProductID column in the top row of the QBE grid.


2. Type ProductNumber: to the left of ProductID.