Have you ever created a table thinking everything looked amazing and was designed perfect only to come back and need to add to it? Maybe you need to change a data type, add a column, delete a column or move a column. It’s an easy fix, right. Just right click on the table, go to Design mode and make your changes. Well, this would be a pretty useless story if all that worked flawlessly.
As you close the table to save all your great, wonderful, glorious changes you are greeted not with a screen that says: “Congrats Brad! Those were good changes you just made to the table. Keep up the good work.” (Could we get some cool reassuring messages like that in the 2011/2012 release please Microsoft??) Instead you get this unfriendly box that says: “Saving changes is not permitted. The changes you made require the following tables to be dropped and re-created. You have either made changes to a table that can’t be re-created or enabled the option Prevent saving changes that require the table to be re-created.”
This is a less that optimum message to get. No one wants to re-create a table every time you need to make a change. Luckily there is a fix. In order to get around this message you can change a setting in the tools menu. Simply go toTools > Options > Designers > Table and Database Designers. From there uncheck the box next to “Prevent saving changes that require table re-creation” and you will be able to edit your tables without issue.
You will still get a message that tables are going to be affected by the changes, which is fine, as your changes will now be saved! Remember to always be careful when editing your tables.
