How to Prevent Duplicate Values in a Microsoft Access Database

Video Transcript

"Hi, My name is Dave Andrews. Today I'm going to show you how to prevent duplicate values in a Microsoft Access Database. Let's begin by opening up access. Click on the start button, put All Programs, Microsoft Office, and let's open Access. Now we're going to create a new database by clicking on the Office button saying new. Then over here on the right, I'm just going to leave the file name to be database two, I'm going to say, create. Here's my new database with its first table. I'm going to save the table that it came up with as table one, and say, o.k. Now let's click on the design view, and let's add the field that we want to maintain uniqueness. I'm going to call this one unique text and we're going to give it a data type of text. Now to make sure that that field remains unique in this database, we're going to create it as an index. Click in indexes on the design tab under show/hide and we're going to create a new one called Unique. For field name choose unique text. Now down here at the bottom, there's an option that says unique. Change this in the drop down to say, yes. It's that easy to make sure the data stays unique. My name is Dave Andrews, and I've just showed you how to prevent duplicate values from being entered in to an access database."