About using bidirectional text in expressions

Microsoft Office Access 2003

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About using bidirectional text in expressions

The feature described in this Help topic is only available if support for right-to-left languages is enabled through Microsoft Office Language Settings.

In addition, to enable the right-to-left features in Microsoft Access, you must be running a 32-bit Microsoft Windows operating system that has right-to-left support— for example, Microsoft Windows 2000.

Access preserves expressions with left alignment and left-to-right reading order. Expression terms are preserved in left-to-right order to ensure the visual readability of expression statements that contain mixed text. As each statement character is entered, the expression display is dynamically updated.

The following table provides examples of bidirectional text that is used in expressions.

Bidirectional text used in expressions

There are a few other considerations when using expressions with right-to-left languages:

  • Access displays Structured Query Language (SQL) statements by using the same rules it uses for displaying expressions.
  • Bidirectional control characters entered in expressions are removed prior to evaluating the expression to avoid possible conflicts.

Note  Bidirectional text used in the Expression Builder will "swap" certain neutral character pairs such as "( )" and "{ }" when the keyboard language is a right-to-left language. To avoid this, change the keyboard language to a left-to-right language or type the correct character.