Weekly Computer Tip # 196
11 May 2007


quickly insert or delete characters in a field
(Microsoft Access)

Today's tip made somebody a very happy bunny during yesterday's Access course I facilitated in London. This person was all in favour of using her keyboard rather than her mouse and was unaware you could quickly add or delete characters to the right of the last character in a selected Access field.

Here's how:

  1. Press ENTER or TAB to move from field to field, as normal, which selects the entire field entry.
  2. Press F2 to activate Edit mode.

The insertion point appears to the right of the last character. In this mode, you can freely move the insertion point. This allows you to insert and delete single characters.

By the way, this tip works similarly in Excel and is something one of my recent Excel with Excel seminar attendees really liked. (See tip #53, url tip_53.php or
excel_with_excel.html if you want to find out more about our next Excel seminar.)

Finally, I know there was no tip last week. (Sorry and thanks for noticing!) I was in Scotland for the Bank Holiday Weekend, followed by a few days work in Glasgow where I felt I was on the set of "Taggart", being surrounded by people who spoke like Jackie Reid and Stewart Fraser. There was even a Robbie who sorted out the network connections on Monday. (Thank God, there was no murrrderrr!)

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