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Validation

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Functional Skills check

Student task accompanies this slide Printable activity

This lesson will cover:

The basic structure of a database.

Setting up a database using field names.

Understanding different data types.

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Validation

Using data validation effectively will reduce the numberof errors in your database.

What does validation mean?

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Valid data

When data is to be entered, it is important that it is valid data. This means that the data is suitable for its purpose,and it is in the format required.

Setting validation rules will help you to obtain valid data.

If you go into the Design Viewof your database table you can set the validation rules.

You can also add in validation text, which will be displayedif any data entered falls outside your validation rules.

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How do validation rules work?

The field has been set up with validation rules:“Low” Or “Moderate” Or “High”.

If any other data is entered, the following validation text will bedisplayed: Please enter Low, Moderate or High.

This means it will only accept one of these three words as an input.

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Database software

Ways of validating your data include:

Length checks – You can set the field sizeto only accept a set number of characters.

Format checks – Selecting correctdata types and setting a format willallow only certain types of data to be entered.

Range checks – You can create checks to see whether the data inputted falls within a certain range.

Presence check – Setting Requiredto ‘yes’ will ensure the field cannot beleft blank and data must be entered.

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Revision

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Verification

Two common types of data entry error are:

Automatic validation may not spot these. Verification is the process of manually checking that data matches its source. It may involve:

Transposition – 2 digits are entered in the wrong order e.g. 81 is typed instead of 18.

Transcription – a different character is typed in altogether.

Double entry – Data is entered twice and the two copies compared for differences.Proofreading – Data is manually checked against the original.

What advantages/disadvantages might these have?

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Validation