Microsoft® Access® 2010 Programmer's Reference

Appendix F. Reserved Words and Special Characters

As with most spoken languages, programming languages also have some words and symbols that have special meanings. In general, words that have specific meanings to a program are called reserved words, and they should not be used to name fields, objects, and variables. Reserved words have a specific meaning to Microsoft Access and to the database engines, both Access Connectivity Engine (ACE) and it's predecessor Jet database engine. For your convenience, we have compiled some lists of reserved words — for Access and for some of the more common interfaces, including Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), Visual Basic (VB), SQL Server, and Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) drivers.

You may want to use these lists as a baseline for creating your own lists. Depending on how your application interfaces with other programs, it may be prudent (and necessary) to avoid using words that have specific programmatic meanings to those programs as well. If you are going to be working with other programs such as SharePoint or .NET, you will also want to get the current list of reserved words for those programs — as well as for Visual Basic.

To compile a list of reserved words, you might consider that a more comprehensive list will allow your program to work with more programs and avoid conflicts as new features and interfaces are added. With that in mind, you might begin with the list of all the properties of database objects, and keywords from VBA and ...