If you’ve read my posts:
I’ve tried to emphasize the fact that Reserved Words and Special Characters were to be avoided at all cost.
Why Exactly?
Both Reserved Words and Special Characters simply cause all sorts of extra headaches (in, amongst other things, Queries & VBA) and can lead to odd and unexplainable behaviors from the database itself.
Special Characters
So when I say Special Characters, which ones am I referring to exactly?
| Name | Symbol |
|---|---|
| Apostrophe | ‘ |
| Asterisk | * |
| At sign | @ |
| Backslash | \ |
| Braces | { } |
| Brackets | [ ] |
| Caret | ^ |
| Colon | : |
| Dollar sign | $ |
| Equal sign | = |
| Exclamation mark | ! |
| Grave accent | ` |
| Greater than sign | > |
| Hyphen | – |
| Less than sign | < |
| Number sign | # |
| Percent | % |
| Period | . |
| Plus sign | + |
| Question mark | ? |
| Quotation mark | “ |
| Semicolon | ; |
| Space | |
| Tilde | ~ |
My Recommendation
Personally, I’d urge you to simply stick with using the letters of the alphabet and nothing more!
[a-zA-Z]
Use CamelCase, or even an underscore to separate word, but just don’t use special characters!
Reserved Words
There are, from my list, 2752 Reserved Words to be avoided. I didn’t think it wise to add such an extensive listing inline in this article. Instead, I would refer you to either Allen Browne’s webpage (which include 98% of the Reserved Words that I could track down):
or my Reserved Word Checker (simply look at the tbl_ReservedWords table which houses the full list) which is available in my article:
