The characteristics of a variable that determine what kind of data the variable can hold. Data types include Big Integer, Binary, Byte, Boolean, Char, Currency, Date, Decimal, Double, Float, GUID, Integer, Long, Long Binary (OLE Object), Memo, Numeric, Single, String, Text, Time, TimeStamp, VarBinary, Variant (default), user-defined types (created with the Type statement), and object data types, which include host-defined object data types and DAO object types.