Numbers stored as text still being treated as numbers -- It's crazy & also, why?

[catluvr]

Hello All,

Still helping my daughter work out bugs in her database.

She has done something that I TOLD her NOT to do ... she used calculated fields in her main data table. I have not disowned her yet!

Her database is too far along for her to go back and change things.

Anyway, she accidentally made a text field to store numbers. I know it's text, it acts like text when being sorted, and i can add alpha characters to the field with no issues but ... the craziest thing is that she uses this field in her numeric calculations and it works (not if there are alpha characters in it)! She didn't know it was a text field ... I think she forgot the field type when she started entering data.

A. How can this actually happen?



B. the numbers use decimals to four to the right of the decimal point. Is there any way to convert this field to be a real number?


Susie
Kansas

[pbaldy]

Try changing the data type to Currency. That should work if there are no alpha characters in the data. Access will sometimes make implicit conversions on text data, but not always. Sometimes 2 + 2 = 22 (+ can act as a concatenation operator).