Adding an "Other" field within a survey question in Microsoft Access forms

Question

I am putting together a survey using Microsoft Access. Within a survey question, there are defined options for the survey respondent to select and also an option of "Other - Please specify". How would the "Other" field be defined within the Access form field wizard? Would you have to create a whole separate Access table variable for this write in option to be included in the form? Thank you very much in advance for any recommendations/solutions that you might provide,

I tried to add an "Other" field as a custom field under forms - but it needs to have an open ended text field accompanying it - not sure how to that within a single field.

Answer 1

You should probably have 2 fields for the answer:

1. The selected option number,
2. A possibly unused text field in case the selected option was "other".

It will not harm you to have a mostly empty text field in the table as it is stored with a variable length. I.e., it will have a minimal impact on the database size if it is empty.

In the input Form you will need some logic to enable/disable this field. Or you can use conditional formatting for this.