<p>Originally I thought to ask if there would be an easy way to provide an automatically managed last update field with MS Access.</p>

<p>After some googling I found following approach:</p>

<pre><code>Private Sub Form_Dirty(Cancel As Integer)

   Me.Last_Update = Date()

End Sub
</code></pre>

<p>Which seems to do the job. I thought I'd share it with others too (and if somebody has some good points that should be considered, feel free to share them)</p>

That might be your best choice on an access database with an access back end- but if you've got a MS-SQL back end, put an update trigger on the table so that you can catch edits regardless of where they come from.
```
```
CREATE TRIGGER [Table_stampUpdates] ON [dbo].[Table]
 FOR Update 
AS 
BEGIN 
UPDATE Table
SET 
modified_by = right(system_user, len(system_user) - charindex('\', system_user)), modified_on = getdate() 
FROM Table inner join inserted on Table.PrimaryKey = Inserted.PrimaryKey
 END
```
```