me.field me![field] me!field

Question

whet is the difference between me. and me!

or which one should be used ?

Answer 1

The general rule is "!" before objects and "." before properties and methods.

So -

Me!txtBoxName  'Control Name

Me!FieldName     ' Refers to underlying field




Me!txtBoxName.Enabled ' Property of control

Me.Requery    ' Method

That said, in VBA you CAN use . when you are referring to controls, and intellisense facilitates this with autocompletion...

Me.txtboxName  ' also acceptable in referring to controls

A couple additional notes...

If you want to refer to the field behind a control not the control itself, you must use !

Also, when referring to controls in a query, you must use ! and you must use the form name rather than "me"  (me and "." only work for control references in VBA, not SQL)

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Miriam Bizup Access MVP

Answer 2

The title of your question also appears to be asking about the usage of square brackets...

The square brackets make it clear to Access that something is a field or control name.  They are *necessary* if you have spaces, some special characters or reserved words in your names, such as:

[My Textbox]  'Brackets needed because of the space

[Date]  'Brackets needed to differentiate a field or control named Date from the VBA function Date()

However, if you follow good naming conventions and avoid using spaces special characters and reserved words in your names (eg: use MyTextbox and InvoiceDate instead of the above names), the brackets are not needed.

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Miriam Bizup Access MVP

Answer 3

whet is the difference between me. and me!

or which one should be used ?

Hi tekoko,

In addition of the answers that Miriam gave, you can also address fields or controls with the syntax:

    Me("MyControl"),

or more general using a variable:

    Me(MyVariable).

The latter is very powerful in structuring code through generalization.

Imb.