Access modify an existing table in Access 2010 2013 2016 tutorial for beginners

okay next I want to show you how to modify an existing table here in Access now uh the reason that you would want to modify a table is maybe you have to add or change or delete Fields okay so what you want to do is you want to right click on a table and then go back into design view so uh design view is where we can add a change SC uh Fields now the thing about design view everybody is you have to be the only one that's in the database for you to get into design view if somebody else is in the database then uh then up here it would say um it would say read only so you can look at the design but you can't actually save your changes so uh axis is a multi-user database so maybe there there's other people that are in there so you know you would ask them to get out of the database or you do these changes before after work when nobody's there but if it's an emergency situation where you have to make these changes then you um you would you know make make sure everybody else is out uh so there's a couple things we can do in design view first of all we can change the Field's name now let me show you something we made this uh table in a previous video it talked about how to make a table from scratch and then at the end of that video it it it asked for a primary key and I said yes I wanted to make a primary key so what it did there is it added a new field called ID and it made that an auto number field so what that means is each record will have a different sequential number so when we said make it a add a primary key it added this field here now notice on the left hand side of this field there's a little key and that key tells you that that field is the primary key okay now one thing you can do here in design view is you can give a field a different name so I want to call this one customer ID so you can always rename a field just by typing over it uh another thing that we can do is we can change a Fields properties let's say we have this last name and in the previous video we set that up as 30 characters long well let's say you're starting to see longer last names than that so maybe we'll make that 40 my point here is that you can go back and change uh these properties for existing Fields now by the way if it used to be 30 and now you're going to try to make it 20 then you might you might uh chop off some of your data now it would it would uh warn you about that it would say hey if you do this you might lose some data but it would actually let you do it after it warned you so we can certainly change a Fields properties another thing that we can do here in design view is we can add a field if I go back to my field list where we made this table from if you notice I'm supposed to have a phone number and a fax number well when I when I made the table I forgot to add the fax number so here's what you're going to do to add a field you you uh right click on a row and you say insert row now that you see where I right clicked over here in this left column so now uh I have a fax number we going to call that faxcore number and we're going to make that a text field all so all right so adding a field is not a problem if you want to add a field in the middle of the table you right click on a field and you say insert Row the other thing that you can do is you can add fields at the bottom of the table all right and like I said in a previous video one table can have up to 256 Fields per table now you should never use that many but it could go up to 256 okay now the next thing that you can do in a T is you can uh move the fields around uh we can reorder the fields so let's say I really wanted the fact number below the phone number well you can reorder any of these fields so what you do is you click on this gray column to the left of the field that you want to move now your mouse becomes a a white Arrow you're going to keep that white arrow in the Box you're going to uh hold down your left Mouse button and then you're just going to drag that down you see that black line that's on the screen that's where the field is going to land when I lift my finger notice how the fax number is below the phone number let me show you that one again uh let's say I wanted to move the start date and I want to move that higher up in the list so I'm going to click on this uh this left column to the left of the start date your mouse becomes a white arrow and you're going to keep your mouse inside of that box now you're going to hold down your left Mouse button and then you're going to drag that up and notice how I can move that start date anywhere in the table so that's how you're going to move your Fields another thing that you can do here in another thing that you can do here in um design view is you can delete a field to delete a field you're going to right click on it and then you're going to say delete row now when you do that it's going to if there was any data in there it would warn you that you're about to do the data now you could undo if as long as you haven't saved your table but once you save your table you can't undo that field and you can't get it back so be careful when you're deleting here in Access okay but you certainly one reason that you go into design view is to change a Field's name another reason is to change a Field's property uh you know like we made that field longer then another reason is to add fields and then another reason is to delete fields uh let me show you another example of changing a Field's properties I'm going to pick on the phone number now a phone number maybe has uh the parentheses and the dashes what you can do is come down here and pick on input mask the input mask is used for data entry and it kind of preformat that field now there's some input masks that are built right in and that's called the input mask wizard as a matter of fact I'm going to put that on a different video so look for a video that's called the input mask wizard in this case I'm going to close this window and I'm going to pick on yes to save that and now the table has been saved with our new Fields so that's how you go into a design view and that's how you modify a table here in Microsoft Access