Access 2010: The Missing Manual

Advanced Editing

In Chapter 1, you learned the essentials of editing, including how to add, delete, and modify records. However, Access has a few finer points that you haven’t seen yet. In the following sections, you’ll tackle two great conveniences in Access—the spell checker and AutoCorrect—and you’ll learn a simple way to insert special characters in your fields.

Gem In The Rough: Find and Replace

The search feature doubles as a powerful (but somewhat dangerous) way to modify records.

Initially, when the Find and Replace dialog box appears, it shows the Find tab. However, you can click the Replace tab to be able to find specific values and replace them with different text. All the settings for a replace operation are the same as for a find operation, except you have an additional text box, called Replace With, to supply the replacement text.

The safest way to perform a replace operation is to click the Find Next button to jump to the next match. At this point, you can look at the match, check that you really do want to modify it, and then click Replace to change the value and jump to the next match. Repeat this procedure to move cautiously through the entire table.

If you’re a wild and crazy skydiving sort who prefers to live life on the edge, you can use the Replace All button to change every matching value in the entire table in a single step. Although this procedure is ridiculously fast, it’s also a little risky. Replace operations can’t be reversed (the Undo feature ...