Alias?

Hi
In the past I have always named my fields in the database as I want them to appear in the website. However this is not always possible as I am learning.
I have a field for example called partID that I wish to display on the list, view, add, edit etc pages as simply "part".
I have tried doing this with alias in the query designer but this does not work (not being a programmer I may have misunderstood the meaning of alias) and gives the following error when you try to add a record for example...

<<< Record was NOT added >>>

Is there a way to acheive this other than in the visual editor - this would cause probelms on rebuilds.
Many thanks
Gareth