Val function returns #error on text/percentage

[allenjasonbrown@gmail.com]

Hello - I have a Access DB with a linked table to a .csv file. One of columns is a percentage so it contains data that looks like "35.96%'. When the data gets linked it creates the column as a text 255 field.

I need to be able to do calculations on this field so I was trying to strip out the numbers in a query using the VAL function.


Example: val(percentage_field)

The problem is that all I get is a #Error when I try that. Any ideas/suggestions what I can do to get around this or what is going wrong. Again, basically I have a text field that I need to remove the "%" sign and convert to numeric so I can perform calculations on.

Any help/suggestions would be really helpful, thanks.

[rpeare]

cdbl(percentage_field)