[Access 2010] Change default formats for data types

Thanks for your assistance. My CSV has these values set to "Yes" or "No," yet Access sets these to 0, -1 after import.

As stated, there's functionally no difference between them. You're only offered the different options in Access for cosmetic reasons because they all evaluate to either 0 (false) or non-zero (true). If you wanted to build a query for a database, you could use those values interchangeably if you're trying to search based on a boolean field. Of course it never hurts to be sure, so load the file into Access and then just make three very simple queries where you know what the outcome should be or can easily verify by looking at the table created when importing. Make one query using true/false, one using yes/no, and one using -1/0. All three should return exactly the same results.

If the above works, you can just use yes/no or true false later and it will function exactly the same. You just have a small, purely cosmetic, issue where the data is -1/0 instead of yes/no, but it's still exactly the same.

Thanks for your help. I understand that they are all functionally the same. But I am teaching teenagers how to use Access for the first time. The book from which they learn uses Access, but in their examples, Boolean fields are displayed as Yes/No. So I'd like Access to display Yes/No for them automatically upon import.

One of the fun areas of working with data in general is to not fret so much about this import. That is, what mattered in the past was the REPORT on said data.

I could make the REPORT show Yes/No on the printout, PDF or Web display and the underlying data be 1, 0, true/false or other.

Yes we could write some Access code to add a column that would use the source data to make a Yes/No but only a beginner would do that.
Bob

Au contraire! I'd say that makes it all the more relevant to the point. Here's a perfect opportunity to teach these students how to deal with unexpected situations. In the real world, the data you get will be full of errors and you'll have to be able to clean it up. You might have a database that's very old and has been maintained by multiple people. The first person may have preferred 0/1 for true/false, the next person might have used yes/no, etc. You will rarely have nice clean scrubbed data like you get from textbooks and sometimes even there you'll run into unexpected and/or peculiar behavior between versions. So here's your chance to go beyond the textbook and teach these kinds how to deal with a simple unexpected situation.

Frankly, I'd think any good educator would have seized on this opportunity already, though with the way teachers are made into scapegoats for virtually everything these days and school budgets have cut so deep into the bone they've practically nothing left, I wouldn't blame you if you've developed kind of PTSD.

View this as the opportunity it is, not a problem. The one thing I had to teach myself pretty much all the way through school was critical thinking. All the way through college, the classes were great at giving me the facts, but not so much at teaching me how to use those facts. So here's your chance to help rectify that problem with one group of students. It's not much, granted, but it is what you as an individual can do to help make the world a slightly better place and give this group of students (along with others who may follow) a small edge over everyone else when trying to find a job. If you plan the seed of how to think critically and logically work through and/or around problems that come up, it's something that can be applied to virtually any other area of life.

I appreciate all the enthusiasm. But really I just asked if something small was possible in Access. You're going off on philosophical tangents regarding how I should be educating our future leaders. I hear what you're saying, and I will take the advice to heart. Thanks for your help.

That is, to write a little code to clean it up or read the file and add records exactly like you wish. Some courses are limited to only what menus a software title has. But Access has us open to writing bits of code to fill in where the menus fall short.
Bob

OK thanks. If I were to pursue the writing-code route, what would be my next step?

Thanks. This is good to know, but is probably beyond the scope of my present issue. I'll pursue a separate workaround.