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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-27T18:25:53+00:00

I’m experiencing an odd data entry bug in MS Access and I am hoping

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I’m experiencing an odd data entry bug in MS Access and I am hoping that someone can possibly help shed a bit of light on why this might be happening and how to fix it.

I have a data table that is defined in our SQL Server database. The definition is below, with only the field names changed.

CREATE TABLE [dbo].[MyTable](
    [ID] [int] IDENTITY(1,1) NOT NULL,
    [TextField1] [nvarchar](10) NOT NULL,
    [TextField2] [nvarchar](50) NOT NULL,
    [Integer1] [int] NOT NULL CONSTRAINT [DF_MyTable_Integer1]  DEFAULT (0),
    [Integer2] [int] NOT NULL,
    [LargerTextField] [nvarchar](300) NULL
) ON [PRIMARY]

As you can see from the definition of this table that there is nothing special about it. The problem that I am having is with a linked data table in an MS Access 2003 database that links through ODBC to this table.

After defining and creating the data table in SQL Server, I opened my working Access Database and linked to the new table. I need to manually create the records that belong in this table. However, when I started to add the data rows, I noticed that as I tabbed out of the LargerTextField to a new row, the LargerTextField was being defaulted to ‘2‘, even though I had not entered anything nor defined a default value on the field?!

Initially, I need this field to be Null. I’ll come back later and with an update routine populate the data. But why would MS Access default a value in my field, even though the schema for the table clearly does not define one? Has anyone seen this or have any clue why this may happen?

EDIT

One quick correction, as soon as I tab into the LargerTextField, the value defaults to ‘2‘, not when I tab out. Small, subtle difference, but possibly important.

As a test, I also created a new, fresh MS Database an linked the table. I’m having the exact same problem. I assume this could be a problem with either MS SQL Server or, possibly, ODBC.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Wow, problem solved. This isn’t a bug but it was certainly not behavior I desire or expected.

    This behavior is occurring because of the data I am manually entering in fields Integer1 and Integer2. I am manually entering a 0 as the value of Integer1 and a 1 into Integer2. I’ve never seen Access automatically assume my data inputs, but it looks like it’s recognizing data that is sequentially entered.

    As a test, I entered a record with Integer1 set to 1 and Integer2 set to 2. Sure enough, when I tabbed into LargerTextField, the value of 3 was auto-populated.

    I hate that this was a problem because of user ignorance but, I’ll be honest, in my past 10+ years of using MS Access I can not recall even once seeing this behavior. I would almost prefer to delete this question to save face but since it caught me off guard and I’m an experienced user, I might as well leave it in the StackExchange archives for others who may have the same experience. :/

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