Bill, quoted below is my standard write-up on the topic. That's mostly
focused on the question of whether to use bang (!) or dot (.) when
referring to controls on a form, but some of the discussion applies to the
larger discussion. In your example case, since you want to refer to a
member of the Fields collection of a recordset, you would use the bang:
rstMyTable!Myfield = "my field value"
If you were referring to a control on a form, you could -- in most
cases -- use either one, because Access goes out of its way to make it
easy for you.
--------- BANG (!) vs. DOT (.) ----------
It's not so much a question of one or the other being "proper syntax", but
that they mean different things that nevertheless almost always give the
same result. As I understand it, the bang (!) notation specifically
denotes that what follows is a member of a collection; in this case, a
member of the form object's default collection, the Controls collection.
The dot (.) notation denotes that what follows is a property or method of
the preceding object. That would logically make the bang notation
"proper" and the dot notation improper.
But wait. Wherever possible, Access makes the controls on a form and the
fields in its recordsource all available as properties of the form. It
also makes the fields of the recordsource available via the bang notation.
I'm not sure exactly how it does this; maybe if a name is not found in
the Controls collection it checks the Fields collection of the form's
recordset as a fallback position. So for most practical purposes
Me!ControlName and Me.ControlName evaluate to the same thing, and the
timing tests I've seen suggest that there is little to choose between them
as far as execution efficiency is concerned. I seem to recall that there
is a very slight difference, but I can't remember which way the advantage
lies, and it's not much. There's a coding-time advantage, however, to
using the dot notation, as it makes the "intellisense" dropdown lists
available. That's a strong argument for using the dot notation, in my
book.
But wait again! I said above that Access makes the controls available as
properties "wherever possible". There are cases where it can't do that.
Specifically, it can't do it when there is already a property of the same
name as the control in question. For example, if your form "Form1" has a
control or a field foolishly named "Name", currently displaying the value
"John Doe", then executing this statement in the form's code module:
Debug.Print Me!Name, Me.Name
will print
John Doe Form1
in the Immediate Window. So you must be careful not to use any reserved
words or built-in properties as names for your controls, if you want to
use the dot notation to refer to them. But then, you should avoid doing
that anyway, as it tends in general to confuse poor Access.
--------- end ----------
--
Dirk Goldgar, MS Access MVP
www.datagnostics.com
(please reply to the newsgroup)
