Telephone format failure

[Leather Knight]

I have a pair of fields, "Phone" and "Fax". Now on all of my forms this works except a few. The calculation is exactly the same in all forms but some will show up with a "?" instead of the number conversion. This is the calculation I use.

"(" & Left (Fax ;3 ) & ") " & Middle ( Fax ; 4 ;3 ) & "-" & Right ( Fax ; 4 )

Most of them work fine, it is just a few that do not. Any advice?

[Kent Searight]

Check relationships. That's usually my first suspect when a calculation field works in one layout and not in another.

Also, if you're using the same basic calc in more than one table, you might want to consider creating a Custom Function to lessen the likelihood of something like this happening.

[LaRetta]

Hi Kevin,

In addition to Kent's suggestion, do you have one calculation for phone and one for fax? And your phone calc works but the fax calc breaks and produces ? Because you can also get ? if that fax CALC is formatted as a number (and it isn't wide enough to display the whole number). Just another possibility to check ...

LaRetta :wink2:

Edited February 6, 2006 by Guest
Corrected wording

[Leather Knight]

Thanks for the replys. I have 17 forms, 8 have phone and fax. I created the fields as text, then made a field called cPhone and cFax. These are calculations placed over the phone and fax fields. In one form they both work perfectly, in another the fax works, but the phone has a "?" in it. I resized it and made it a text calculation, same issue.

[Genx]

yeh i had a random problem with a "?" result being returned from an unstored text calc a while ago... never worked out the problem... so id be interested to any reasons for this aswell

[Leather Knight]

Got it! I used this as a number.

"(" & Left(Abs(GetAsNumber(Phone Number));3) & ") " & Middle(Abs(GetAsNumber(Phone Number));4;3) & "-" & Right(Abs(GetAsNumber(Phone Number));4)

[LaRetta]

1) Try copying the phone calc that works and pasting it on your layout.

2) The phone calc that breaks, right-click. Does it indicate number as well as text formatting options? If number is in the popup, is it set to General or to Leave Data as entered?

If none of those things work help then we would need to see your file. You haven't explained your relationships; whether you've made sure you are matching the layout table occurrence to the field table occurrence, etc. But it sure seems like FM thinks there is a number in there somewhere.

UPDATE: I just saw your post. Umm, you are going backwards in efficiency here. You don't NEED to convert them. Your Phone and Fax fields should be TEXT. And your calculations should be text.

LaRetta

Edited February 6, 2006 by Guest