Linking a frontend to a backend

George_Hepworth 

That wasn't a very good example, I'm afraid.

I want to try again.

The scenario is similar, with a different step.

What happens is this: ADDING a linked table is different from REFRESHING, or RELINKING a table.

If you relink, by definition, you are using the same aliased name in Access to point to a different table, either in the same back end accdb or another back end accdb. That's where the idea of a Production vs Development accdb comes in. You can tell Access to relink one or the other using the same aliased name in the Navigation Pane.

When you ADD a linked table, though, you are telling Access "In addition to all of the existing tables you know about, use this one too." That's when the incrementing suffix comes into play. Access know about 

tblOne, which is a link to a table in the production accdb. When you ADD another tblOne, Access is not about to overwrite that production accdb because it's more convenient to re-use and existing alias. It knows better. You said you want to ADD a table, so it adds it. However, it can't use the same name. It has to come up with a new one and it does, "tblOne1". It's up to you to sort it out after that.

If you let Access overwrite existing table names when adding production or development tables, without explicating saying, "Relink this name to a different table", you would never know for sure what mixture of Production and Development tables happened to be in play with examining each table's connection string, one at a time.