Character field size

If you examine any initial paper sketch of the design of your table, produced in the planning stage, you will notice how some columns have plenty of white space and others are densely packed. Real data rarely conforms to an idealized table with evenly sized columns. Those densely packed columns are probably text fields. It is a good design principle to decide, for each separate text field, the number of characters required to accommodate the largest individual item of information likely to be entered. Write this figure down for each of the text fields. The maximum size of a standard text field is 255 characters. For larger quantities of textual information you may need to use a memo. See Memo.

The other non-character data items in your table design will not require a specific field size to be entered when you create the table. Ability has built-in defaults to make table creation as easy as possible for you.