MS Access form field display format

Question

Hi all
We are working on an application using MS Acces 2003 and SQL Server 2005.
We are saving a fields that contain a text data for example 002215.28 but we want to display it on the screen in a special format for example like this 00 22 15.28.

To do so on the Form Design toolbar and in the Format property box, we type a custom format
00 00 00.##\.####
but when we open the form screen the data appear like it was saved in the table

Please may you advise

Answer 1

It seems that the column may be a text column, if so, you need say, @@ @@ @@\.@@

To format the control using number formats, you must first convert to number with, say, Val:

=Val([TextString])

Make sure that the control does not have the same name as the column, call it, say txtTextString.

There are various disadvantages to this, including:

• The control is not editable
• Val will return zero for alphas, giving 00 00 00..
• Val will return an error for Null values

The last two are not difficult to work around.

If the first is a problem, you may have to consider some VBA to fill the field.