How to count characters?

[Jorge Junior]

Hi!
I'm new to Access and to the forum.



I know how to use IBM Lotus Approach, but Access is a little different.
In Approach, if I want to count only the letters in "six-year-old", I use:
Length(Trim(Translate(FieldName, '-', '')))

Trim to ignore the spaces and translate to ignore the hyphens by converting them to ''.

I don't know how to do that in Access.
I googled and found = Compr([FieldName]). In my case, the field name is PALAVRA and the type of data is text. The field that will show the number of letters is text too. I've already changed it to numeric, but it made no difference.

I also tried =Len([FieldName]), but Access automatically changes =Len to =Compr.

My Access is in Portuguese, but is says something like this "the search engine of the database doesn't recognise the field 'palavra' in a validation expression or the default value in the table.'

Does anybody know how to do it?

[June7]

Instead of Translate use Replace and instead of Length use Len.

Don't know what you mean by 'changes =Len to =Compr'. Doesn't happen to me.

You are saving this calculated value to table field? Why?

Might need double quote marks ("") instead of the single '' (apostrophes).