In my main table (in the back end), I have about 11 thousand records (with 19 columns) and when I first created the table I left most of the field sizes at the default value (255). However I have now reduced many of them, some to just 5, but the file size after running the compact and repair tool remained almost the same (3MB) :(

Should I have expected a massive reduction in the file size? :confused:

no, you wouldnt expect any reduction in size

access only stores whatever space it needs to hold strings - it doesnt preallocate a full 255 chars for each string - its just that changing the string size restricts the maximum space allocated, and is more for dbs management purposes than for dbs size control

3MB is pretty small for a mdb

thats good then, I wondered if something was wrong. Thanks :)