Access attachment control not working

See also a re­lat­ed ar­ti­cle by Pear­son Wil­ley How to fix ac­cess at­tach­ment con­trol not work­ing prob­lem?

Does your ac­cess data­base at­tach­ment con­trol is not work­ing prop­er­ly? Look­ing for some quick fix­es to re­solve this is­sue? Stick to this post to get an an­swer to all your queries re­gard­ing ac­cess at­tach­ment con­trol not work­ing is­sue.

For a more clear idea about the is­sue just check out this prac­ti­cal sce­nario:

I am work­ing with Ac­cess 2007 and need to add an at­tach­ment field to an ex­ist­ing sub­form.  I have added an at­tach­ment field to the un­der­ly­ing table and it works fine.

I added the field to the sub­form, but it does noth­ing when I dou­ble-click on it - no er­ror or any­thing.  When I right-click on it, the man­age at­tach­ments op­tion is dis­abled.

I went back to the table and was able to suc­cess­ful­ly at­tach a Word doc­u­ment, but when I looked at it through the form, the doc­u­ment did not show up.

I do have an­oth­er Word doc­u­ment that is at­tached as an OLE ob­ject and wasn't sure if that was caus­ing the prob­lem, so I cre­at­ed an­oth­er form from the same main table and sub­table and the at­tach­ment field works per­fect­ly.

I can­not fig­ure out what could be caus­ing this not to work.  What I want to do is even­tu­al­ly get rid of the OLE ob­jects and have only the at­tach­ments, but don't want to delete the OLE ob­jects un­til I am sure the at­tach­ments are in and work­ing prop­er­ly.

What’s the use of at­tach­ments in Ac­cess?

In the Ac­cess data­base, at­tach­ments are main­ly used to save mul­ti­ple files with­in one sin­gle field. It al­lows you to save sev­er­al types of files in the at­tach­ment field.

Here is an ex­am­ple to have a clear idea of this. For ex­am­ple, you are hav­ing a data­base of job con­tacts. With the at­tach­ment op­tion, you can at­tach re­sumes and pho­tos to­geth­er in each con­tact of your Ac­cess data­base record. So all in all, ac­cess at­tach­ment data type is the best op­tion if you want to save more than the ba­sic in­for­ma­tion with­in a sin­gle field. But some­times this amaz­ing fea­ture stops work­ing and this ul­ti­mate­ly leads to gen­er­at­ing is­sues in adding the at­tach­ments in the records.

What prob­lems do you face when ac­cess at­tach­ment is not work­ing?

• If any prob­lem oc­curs in the ac­cess at­tach­ment data type, then it will bloat the data­base which is quite hard to man­age.
• Any prob­lem with the ac­cess at­tach­ment data type also leads to the cor­rup­tion of the Ac­cess data­base.

How to fix the is­sue?

Fol­low­ing are some best fix­es to re­solve the is­sue.

Fix 1 Add at­tach­ment field In datasheet view

• Open the Ac­cess table in the datasheet view af­ter that hit the first avail­able blank col­umn pre­sent here.

For easy fetch­ing of the first blank col­umn just search for the text “Add New Field” in the head­er col­umn.

• Hit the datasheet view tab, and then get into the Data Type & For­mat­ting.
• Just tap the down ar­row as­sign which is pre­sent next to the data type op­tion. Now hit the at­tach­ment op­tion.
• Ac­cess will now set the at­tach­ment data type for your se­lect­ed field. In the head­er row of field, an at­tach­ment icon seems to ap­pear.
• In be­low fig­ure you can see the new at­tach­ment field.  You will see the pa­per clip icon with­in the field’s head­er row.
• By de­fault, you are not al­lowed to en­ter any text with­in the at­tach­ment field’s head­er row.
• Now save all the changes you have done.

Re­mem­ber: don’t try to con­vert a new field to an­oth­er data type. But you have the op­tion to delete an er­ror hav­ing field.

Fix 2 Try to add at­tach­ment field in de­sign view

• From the nav­i­ga­tion pane of Ac­cess data­base win­dow, just se­lect the table in which you have to do the changes and make a right-click on it.
• Now tap the menu View › De­sign View.
• Now from the Field Name col­umn, just choose the blank row. Af­ter that as­signed name to the At­tach­ment field.
• By be­ing in the same row choose the Data Type › At­tach­ment op­tion.
• Save all the changes that you have done.
• Hit the De­sign tab and then go to the Views group.  Tap the ar­row key pre­sent with­in the view but­ton. Tap on the datasheet view op­tion to open the table in the datasheet view.

Fix 3 Re­pair cor­rupt ac­cess at­tach­ment

Chances are also that the is­sue due to the oc­cur­rence of some cor­rup­tion is­sue.

In this case, you can use a data­base re­pair soft­ware which is main­ly de­signed to re­pair or dam­aged data­base files. The pow­er­ful al­go­rithm of this tool can also re­pair se­vere­ly cor­rupt­ed Ac­cess data­base files. It also has a high­ly in­ter­ac­tive GUI that helps users to eas­i­ly op­er­ate and re­pair Ac­cess data­base with­out mak­ing changes in the orig­i­nal struc­ture of the file. It eas­i­ly re­stores dam­aged or cor­rupt ta­bles, queries, in­dex­es, and oth­er data.