When I started using Access back in the early 90s, it was VERY important to use the smallest field sizes possible to store your data. Hard drive space was at a premium (20 MB hard drives, anyone? No... not 20 GB... 20 MEGABYTE!) and Access did NOT do a good job of keeping your tables small. If you had a 50 character field size for a field like "Last Name" and your largest name was only 15 char long, you'd lose a lot of space.

Well... flash forward to 2020, and the newer versions of Access do NOT seem to have this problem. I've been running some tests over the past two days and it looks like you no longer have to worry about this. I'll publish my findings in a video soon (probably later today) but my preliminary results look very promising. It doesn't matter if you make ALL of your text field sizes 255 char to handle the largest possible amount of data, they don't waste any space! Totally different from 1994. Plus, the largest possible Access database file size is 2 GB, and I've got a 2 TB (1000 times larger than that!) in my laptop. LOL

I'll post an update soon. I actually built a database to test compacting and repairing databases. It opens another database, fills it with records, closes it, compacts it, records the data, and does it again with a different set of data. I'm testing this because - just like with Autonumbers - I was always taught a certain way to do things (like keep your text fields small, always use an Autonumber). That's what I learned when I started. That's been in every book I've read over the past 20 years. Now that I'm the "expert" I want to test it for myself and see. I was right about Autonumbers. Now it looks like my thinking on text fields may need to change.