Is it possible to populate one field with a text or date value?

The reason behind this is that the client wants to choose from three options namely  N/A  or  TBC  or  Date .  There are about twenty fields for this Register and the field combo boxes will all have these three selections.

If this is not possible I will have to go back to the client and tell them that this is not going to work in Access. This would be hard to do because they have been doing this in Excell for some time and with lots of data the register is growing too fast ..

I have been enjoying the tutorials and it is a good refresher for me as I have not used Access for a number of years.

Thanks for helping out. Hope to hear from you soon, or anybody that has an idea how to solve this problem.


Regards,
Gerry Leibbrandt

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Reply from Richard Rost:

You can't store text in a date field. You could store a date in a text field, but you lose the ability to perform date-wise calculations (like date+30) and have them work without converting the text to date first. And, you lose the little calendar date picker.

You could also have three checkboxes bound to Y/N fields that say "N/A," "TBC," and "DATE" and if the user selects the DATE checkbox, allow them to enter the date in a textbox right next to the checkbox.

[ ] N/A
[ ] TBC
[x] DATE: [5/5/2014]

There are a million ways to do everything and YES, Access can handle just about any situation. If you absolutely have to use a single field, then make it text and just type your date into the text field.