Any explanation for odd autonumbers? (1 Viewer)

Paine

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I've noticed a number of peculiar looking auto-numbers crop up on our Student database system. It doesn't seem to be affecting performance of the system, but I am still concerned that this may lead to future problems.

For example, 1.625E+03 has cropped up.

At the moment I have only noticed this happen on the learner enrolments form.

We use MS Access 2007 to design the database, and it runs using Access 2000 viewer. Up until now we have not had problems with this set up (aside from the initial teething problems when we first tried to get the viewer working back in February)

I ran a compact and repair yesterday to fix another problem, but I noticed this is still there today.

Any ideas?

Thanks!
 

Paine

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Hi John,

I came across that article whilst looking through the internet for solutions.

Our Jet service pack is up to date, we haven't been appending data from one table to another, and I'm not sure there is a problem with our form / subform relationship because they use linking data between different tables, e.g. student ID from the student table is on the parent form, but the child subform draws from the exams table, or the exclusions table, etc - so nothing from the same table? I haven't changed any of the properties of the autonumbers so they are still defaults.

When I first set up the database I did copy information from our practice database across - could this have created a legacy problem? Since then we have added more than 2500 records though, so I am surprised if this is the problem.

All very odd!
 

spikepl

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What is the format property of the control displaying the number 1625 ?
 

Paine

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That's a very interesting question. I went on to the form in design view, navgated to the subform and selected properties for the enrolment ID. Under data, the Text Format is 'plain text'. Under Format it was blank. I changed this to 'General Number' but the problem still seemed to happen for the first entry on the subform.

When I saw format I thought perhaps it could have been set to Scientific because this is exactly what the numbers are coming out like. But alas, changing it to general number hasn't helped. Bizarre!
 

GinaWhipp

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Not bizarre, AutoNumbers have been doing that for years. Expanding the field width should give a whole number BUT does not change what has happened... The AutoNumber decided to pick a *weird* number. One of the many reasons that if you care about the value in the AutoNumber field you whould not use AutoNumber but DMax() which offers you *control* over that field.

The only problem with what is happening is what was mentioned in the article John provided a link to. Keep that page handy but in the long run... AutoNumber just does that.
 

Paine

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Thanks Gina, much appreciated!

You're right, we're not too bothered about what an autonumber looks like because they're just functional. I was worried that perhaps the system was developing some sort of fatal error, but if this is a normal thing then that's great news for us! :D



Steve
 

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