Summing up text fields

[henrywid]

Hi all,

Hope I can explain my question well, here it goes:

I have a text field which is called the Remarks. This remarks is to capture any comments in text form. Now, everyday and every shift(3 shifts in total), the data keeper will have to key in comments. For example in 3 day time period, there would be a total of 9 records being created:

Date1 Shift1 Remarks1-1

Date1 Shift2 Remarks1-2

Date1 Shift3 Remarks1-3

Date2 Shift1 Remarks2-1

Date2 Shift2 Remarks2-2

Date2 Shift3 Remarks2-3

Date3 Shift1 Remarks3-1

Date3 Shift2 Remarks3-2

Date3 Shift3 Remarks3-3

In a another database, i would like to sum up these remarks into 1 field, that's because, I only want to see it under 1 date. So I would create a calculated field, SumRemarks = Sum(File1::Remarks)

Therefore, in this new file, I would only have 3 records:

Date1 SumRemarks1

Date2 SumRemarks2

Date3 SumRemarks3

And ideally, this sumremarks would show all the 3 shifts record in each date. But it didn't. I am just trying my luck to see if this method works, apparently it didn't... anyone got a better way around this?

Thanks in advance!

Henry

[grant]

Why not make your "Date1 SumRemarks1" a calculation field that looks like this:

Date1 Shift1 Remarks1-1 & Date1 Shift2 Remarks1-2 &Date1 Shift3 Remarks1-3

This will add the three fields together. Then you will have all three REMARKS in one field.

You could also add some more to the calculation so that it looks like this:

" Remarks - Shift One: "Date1 Shift1 Remarks1-1 & " Shift Two: " &Date1 Shift2 Remarks1-2 &" Shift Three: "&Date1 Shift3 Remarks1-3

This would separate the three comments with the heading "Shift ..."

You could also put in the line break and it would put each REMARK on a new line.

Hope this helps !

[henrywid]

hi Grant,

Thanks for the reply. That might seem workable. The problem is that I am building on an old database and it already has this remarks field in it. To re-alter the entire structure would mean re-entering the 2000 records in it.

Thanks.

Henry

[grant]

No, I think you would find that if you changed the overall field into a calculation, you would get the three sub fields in it.

If this is still aproblem, why not make a backup copy of the file so far and then do the recalculation and move on from there !