The maximum length of a Text field in a Jet (MDB) database is 255
characters, so you'll never have a Text field that is several hundred
characters long - you'll need a Memo field for that. (I realize you may
already know this, and be using the term 'text' in a generic sense to mean
both Text and Memo fields, but as I can't be sure it seems safer to be
specific about this).
Wide fields make report design more challenging, certainly, but really, it
comes down to what do the users need? If they need to store long,
descriptive text, then that's what we have to do. There is, after all, not
much point in an app that looks good if it doesn't do what the users need it
to do.
I would turn your question around - it's not a question of the length of
text fields impacting the database requirements, it's the database
requirements that determine the length of the text fields.
For whatever it may be worth, I generally leave text fields at the default
50 characters unless I have a specific reason to change it. Most of them
don't need to be that wide, but in my opinion the time it would take to
change them would not be justified. There are more productive ways of using
our time.
