Following

I think you can do this with default value and the on focus event to clear the text out when it's clicked. I'd have to look at how to retrieve the description from the table, it's probably doable, but if nothing else you just type that manually into the default value field.

You'd have to do more with like checking if a value was entered and if not, put the text back in kind of thing too.

MyText has a default value of "Enter Phone Number"
The GotFocus event of the textbox is

MyText=""
The LostFocus event is

If IsNull(MyText) or MyText="" Then
MyText="Enter Phone Number"
End If

This behaves like you're explaining, now I'll just look how to get the description.

    Dim MyDescription
    MyDescription = CurrentDb.TableDefs("MyTable").Fields("MyText").Properties("Description")
    MsgBox MyDescription

Returns the description. Then just put the lego pieces togethor. :)

Use the .Format property, for text values it will be like this:
@;"Please enter the right name"

Thank you Adam

Alex's solution is far easier ;P Although you'd have to probably make a function to pull the description into that

Richard,
This makes an excellent quick tip video

Already added it. :)

If you put text inside the textbox, the textbox is not empty anymore, and that may affect form operations that need to check whether textboxes are empty or not.  You need a way to show text while the textbox remains empty, like what HTML can do (see picture below).  But Access can't do that, not without some complicated VBA coding; and if it gets cumbersome it may not be worth it.  My suggestion is find another way to display text for the user, such as adding a label right below the textbox.

Richard,

I would like to add this feature to the list of enhancements we are keeping for the Access Team.

You could place a label over the top of the control and handle clicks etc to hide it

Hiding/unhiding labels on textboxes could get cumbersome if there were lots of textboxes, or even just a few.  I believe this kind of thing originated from HTML, with textboxes that didn't have labels (see picture below).  If you want to mimic how a web interface looks, you may want to make web apps instead.  Let Access be Access, and do things Access can do instead.

Here's my take on it: Text Box Hints