this is part four of our table series in microsoft access databases and we're going to be looking at the lookup harry potter i mean lookup wizard in this video so we're gonna go straight into the database so we can look at what we're going to do so for a lookup wizard you basically want to use that when you want to limit the user to a certain list of options for a particular field so if there is a list of options that you want to select from normally you would click from a like a list box or from a combo box to select these are the only available options for this particular field so let's go have a look at the table or what it looks like without a lookup wizard so let's say for example division do you see divisions a b or c now when i click on it it allows me to type in the value um so maybe we don't want that maybe we want to have a little box here that little arrow there where you click and you can say hey select one of these options well if that's the case we're going to come over here and we're going to come to the division and we're going to change its data type to a lookup harry potter i mean was it so there it is boom so when we go to the lookup wizard a box will pop up that will guide us through the steps that we want to take now sometimes you have a list of all the available options in another query or table if that's the case you would just select on that and you would go select which table or query it is and select which field from that table where you want to be the list of options in this case i would just want to type it in i don't have something that says a b c i just want to type them in so i'm going to click on the top the values in option and click on next and here we specify what our options are so i'm going just typing a as the first option and then b is the second option and then c is the third option and then i'm going to click on next and then sometimes you will allow them to add other options that aren't one of the three that they mentioned but we want to say yes no they must only have a b or c so we're going to limit them to this particular list for the division okay and then we're going to go finish you can allow multiple values but i'm going to click on finish and what you'll notice is that the division changed back to short text now does it do anything well if we come here to look up you'll see under lookup we have a combo box option a value list and the options in my combo box so what does that look like let's go have a look let's go save everything yes so now when i come to division if i click on division you see there's a little arrow there and if i click on it it gives me all the options available there we go that's a lot better if you want to edit those options after you've done the lookup wizard then you can just go back to design you go to the lookup option and you can change it maybe you want the b option to be first and then i'll just go delete b from there and i'll put b in front rather and that way i can change the order they're all separated by semicolons i could also change it to be a list box or a text box if i wanted to so you can also specify those options if you said from a query or from a table then the details of that query or table will be here under the value list so you can actually change it there as well so let's go have a look so if i come here to division you'll notice that b now is the first option okay so there we go there's an example of a lookup wizard let's do another example for example if we had car registration um and we wanted a list of all the cars let's pretend we've got a list only got certain cars that are available then i could use the lookup wizard here i could type in the values go next and then i could specify which are the registration numbers are the cars that i want i want this car so you can have a list of all the cars that we've got on our record so i can do that and just add them inside and go next and finish and so now when i select a car from the list car registration boom it'll be one of the ones that i specified in this example i was i've made a new table called tbl cost and i've just stored the details of the car so there's the car registrations they makes and their models and so i've got this nice little table so now how do i access those cars in this registration so let's go to design view and we're going to use the lookup wizard for car registration we're going to redo it instead of going to the values we want to get it from a table or query so let's go next which table we want to get from the tbl cars table next and which field is the field that we want to get from we want to get from the car registration field that field so we have the car registration numbers that were in that field yes that's the one and you can sort them if you wanted to you know let's sort it by car registration that's fantastic so there we go so that's what it looks like so go next yes yes yes finish so now we're going to go and view the data boom so if i click on car registration you see all the cars that were in that table are now listed over here for me so there we go so there we've got a nice little table so just to recap if you want to limit users to a list of options for a particular field you just click on the field and it might say short text in it but you go to the lookup harry potter i mean wizard and you just follow the instructions and if you've already done it whenever you click on the field that's already done the lookup was it should be the lookup option over here where you can change the fields there you can see it's from a table of query so you can see what the options are if it was a value list you can see the values there and you can actually change those values so that is the lookup wizard for other videos on access as well as stuff on excel you can go to our youtube channel please click on the subscribe channel and like our videos we'd love to hear from you so leave a comment and remember don't do it the long way do it the mr long way