TOO MANY FIELDS DEFINED ---- CAN U HELP ?

[Michel Mondor]

I am currently building a Dbase for controlling the flow
of workorders in my small business. It currently has 147
fields defined. The data type of those fields are either
text or numbers. In some cases, when I went to change
the field size to either a larger or smaller value, I got
a "too many fields defined" error message. Even after
deleting some fields and dropping to my actual number of
147 from a previous 163 fields, I still get the same
message.

Any ideas ? Thanks

Mike,

 

[Lynn Trapp]

A table that requires 147 fields is likely to be non-normalized. Do you
have any "repeating" fields in your table?

 

[John Vinson]

I am currently building a Dbase for controlling the flow
of workorders in my small business. It currently has 147
fields defined. The data type of those fields are either
text or numbers. In some cases, when I went to change
the field size to either a larger or smaller value, I got
a "too many fields defined" error message. Even after
deleting some fields and dropping to my actual number of
147 from a previous 163 fields, I still get the same
message.

I agree with Lynn, that this table is MUCH too wide. 60 fields is a
HUGE table. I'm all but certain that you have some one-to-many
relationships embedded in each record!

That said... use Tools... Compact and Repair Database to recover the
altered fields. There are 255 fields allowed and each time you change
a field's properties it "uses up" one of the 255 slots; compacting
recovers them.

 

[Duane Hookom]

I agree with Lynn. However, you are allowed to add up to 255 fields but may
need to compact your database to "clean house" in your table.

 

[Lynn Trapp]

44 fields for parts used sounds like "repeating fields" to me. Could you
post the structure of the table?

--
Lynn Trapp
MS Access MVP
www.ltcomputerdesigns.com
Access Security: www.ltcomputerdesigns.com/Security.htm

 

[Michel Mondor]

Thanks for the Tip John. It works like a charm now. Can
finally go on with trying it out.

Mike

 

[John Vinson]

No they are all distinct fields. Each field of the
workorder (paper copy that is) is in that DB. In other
words, there are over 44 fields used only for parts used,
separated in 4 different "sections" (qty, inventory #,
description, remarks).

If these are qty1, qt2, qt3, ... qt11; inventory#1, inventory#2,
inventory#11 and so on... then Lynn is absolutely correct and your
table is going to provide endless trouble.