Question

In General

I’m just getting started in MS Access and one of the issues that keeps creeping up is with lookup columns in tables will stop showing the lookup name, and start showing lookup ID.

For example, say I have a search form that returns rows from my Orders table matching customer to ‘mike’.

   | order_no  |  cust_name | order_item  | order date |
   |---------------------------------------------------|
   | 10204     | mike       | 23          | 2011-05-01 |
   | 10205     | mike       | 36          | 2011-06-17 |

I’ll be plugging away fiddling around with the form, and all of a sudden it’ll stop showing my customer name, and start show the actual customer_id.

Like so:

   | order_no  |  cust_name | order_item  | order date |
   |---------------------------------------------------|
   | 10204     | 112467     | 23          | 2011-05-01 |
   | 10205     | 112467     | 36          | 2011-06-17 |

Question: In general, what can I do to get this back to displaying the customer name? What properties of the fields displayed in my form are involved?

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A specific example

I was just working on a search form and decided to change the site label (the one selected in yellow) from “site” to “Site” with capitalized S.

When I went back to Form View I noticed that it was no longer showing the Site name, and was showing the id instead.

But the site combo box above is still correctly showing the site names.

What can I do to fix this?

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Here’s a screen shot of the site textbox

And here’s one for the site label.

Answer 1

The “magic” properties to look:

If in Form Design,

• right click the offending field > Properties > Format > Column Widths
• right click the offending field > Properties > Format > Column Count
• right click the offending field > Properties > Data > Row Source
• right click the offending field > Properties > Data > Bound Column

If in Table Design,

• Select the offending field > Field Properties (look below) > Lookup tab > Row Source
• Select the offending field > Field Properties (look below) > Lookup tab > Bound Column
• Select the offending field > Field Properties (look below) > Lookup tab > Column Count
• Select the offending field > Field Properties (look below) > Lookup tab > Column Widths

What is what?

• Your Row Source is a table (either from an actual table or query result) where it has columns.
• The Bound Column is the column which your form will take the value from.
• The column count is the number of columns to “display” from the Row Source, starting from the Row Source’s first column.
• Columns Widths lets you set the width of the displayed columns. To hide a particular column, set the width to 0. The syntax to set the width is: #;#;#… where each # is a number, the width of the corresponding column in sequence.

In the case of your cust_name, check all the values in the abovementioned fields. Assuming your customer_id is in column one and cust_name in column two. Then you have the following settings:

Row Source = customer_table
Bound Column = 1
Column Count = 2
Column Width = 0;3