Separating Data In A Field

  • Thread starter Thread starter Mark
  • Start date Start date
M

Mark

I just started working for this company and they have this
database that they use for their employee's files. In
this database they have a field called "Comments" in which
they have put all types of information in, like vacation
time, evaluations, sick time, promotions and so on. Is
there a way for me to separate this information and put it
each type in its own field? Like all the vacation time in
a field called "Vacation" and so on. Any help will be
greatly appreciated.
 
You would have to parse it out, so long as there's a common delimiter to the
data. ie, if your Comments field had the following data:

"Vacation: 40, Evaluation: Due in February, Sick Time: 8 hours"
"Vactation: 80, Evaluation: Done already, Sick Time: None left"

You could then parse it out into different fields based on the comma being
the delimiter.

http://www.mvps.org/access/strings/str0003.htm has an example of how to
parse out data from a field into multiple fields. You could modify the
parse code to find the ":" within each parsed value (ie, "Vacation: 40"),
and use the data to the left of the colon as the field name, and the data to
the right of the colon as that field's data.

However, if the users just enter the comments data willy-nilly then trying
to parse out the data into multiple fields will be a nightmare.
 
Back
Top