too many fields defined

[Richard Farrell]

When saving changes to field sizes in a table containing
188 fields the following error message is received: "Too
many fields defined ( Error 3190) You tried to perform an
operation that involves more than 255 fields.". I am
running Access 97 on Windows XP.

Thanks,
Richard

 

[John Vinson]

When saving changes to field sizes in a table containing
188 fields the following error message is received: "Too
many fields defined ( Error 3190) You tried to perform an
operation that involves more than 255 fields.". I am
running Access 97 on Windows XP.

Short answer: Compact the database. You're limited to 255 fields, but
every time you *change* a field it uses up one of these slots.
Compacting recovers them.

Long answer (long for you anyway :-{) ...) A table with 188 fields is
almost certainly not properly normalized. I've needed as many as 60
fields in a table a couple of times in the past 20 years. You very
likely have a one to many relationship embedded in each record, which
should be pulled out into a relationship between two tables. What is
this table used for? What are some typical fields?