Question

I’m having trouble with MS Access. I have boolean and Memo type fields and I’m using aggregate functions (Group by etc). The Bools give information about a survey result, and the memo field explains the reasoning behind that result.

I’ve hit two minor hiccups,

1. My booleans are displaying as 0 (unchecked) and -1 (checked)
   I managed to revert them back to tick boxes (slightly more obvious what they are) but now they are back to numeric expressions, and I don’t know what I did.
2. My memo/boolean field behaves weirdly when comparing FIRST/LAST
   Before, when I grouped by the memo field I had duplicates, the ones with a checked boolean tickbox came First, and were lined up with the memo field. When I apply FIRST logic it displays the ‘last’ of the duplicates, eg, with two ‘duplicates’ that only vary by the boolean and memo, FIRST displays duplicate 2. If I apply LAST logic it displays duplicate 1.

To clarify, when using GROUP BY it displayed as such:

Name|Risk? |Memo
Bob |Tick  |Description one
Bob |Untick|Description two

And when selecting the risk and memo field to only display FIRST I got:

Name|Risk? |Memo
Bob |0     |Description two

Which was not the first one out of the duplicates!

So I have to ask, how are agregated booleans displayed, and why do they get converted to 0/-1? And how are Booleans/Memo fields sorted using FIRST/LAST logic?

Answer 1

I am not sure what you are saying, but zero (0) comes before minus one (-1), so the No (0) will be first. As for changing to 0,-1, they are not, that is what the field contains, anything else is format. If you are running a query, you can add a format to suit:

 SELECT Format([ayesno],"Yes/No") FROM table

More: Format Property – Yes/No Data Type

The bottom corner shows Top 1, which is what I suspect you want.

sSQL = "SELECT t.Comment, t.TickThis " _
& "FROM Table2 t " _
& "WHERE t.ID IN ( " _
& "SELECT Top 1 ID FROM Table2 t2 " _
& "WHERE t2.Comment=t1.Comment " _
& "ORDER BY t2.TickThis Desc, t2.Comment) "