John W. Colby
jwcolby at colbyconsulting.com
Wed Mar 9 06:26:31 CST 2005
No idea. Is that an Office thing or a Windows thing? I told him to always load the whole enchilada when installing Office because I was tired of not having the various pieces I needed to troubleshoot. John W. Colby www.ColbyConsulting.com Contribute your unused CPU cycles to a good cause: http://folding.stanford.edu/ -----Original Message----- From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com [mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Rocky Smolin - Beach Access Software Sent: Wednesday, March 09, 2005 12:13 AM To: Access Developers discussion and problem solving Subject: Re: [AccessD] Learned something else new today They would have had to have the Asian language support loaded as well. Why did they do that? Rocky ----- Original Message ----- From: "John W. Colby" <jwcolby at colbyconsulting.com> To: "'Access Developers discussion and problem solving'" <accessd at databaseadvisors.com> Sent: Tuesday, March 08, 2005 7:57 PM Subject: [AccessD] Learned something else new today >I wrote an app for an insurance call center. The head tech cheese was >trying to get a bunch of report queries to work "easier" which were >written by a young lady they assigned that task. She had been pulling >a result set > with dozens of event records for each claim then "cutting and pasting" the > right ones into excel. JohnS had turned it into a group by and > successfully > caused it to pull just the result set he wanted. However a memo field was > displaying a pair of Chinese characters (literally). Very strange > looking, > and definitely not what we wanted to see. > > It turns out that he had a group by on that field. Can you guess what > it was doing (or my educated guess anyway)? It took me a few minutes > to figure it out!!! > > As you probably know, memo fields are not stored in the record, but > rather > a > (32 bit?) pointer to the memo is stored. The GroupBy was causing the memo > field to be evaluated literally, thus it was taking the POINTER and > displaying (and grouping by) that. I am also guessing that Access knew > that > a memo is supposed to be text so it was doing an implicit cstr() on the > pointer to attempt to coerce the value back to text and to display the > value > as a string. Thus it was displaying Chinese (and other odd) characters. > > By changing the GroupBy to a Max (I think anyway) the memo field text > reappeared. > > I have never actually seen, or found any way to see the actual pointer > to the memo field out in the memo area but it certainly appears that > using a groupby on that field caused the pointer data itself to be > exposed as the "value" of the memo. > > Cool huh? > > So if your ever seeing a pair of totally weird characters in a group > by query, see if the field is a memo with a group by under it. > > John W. Colby > www.ColbyConsulting.com > > Contribute your unused CPU cycles to a good cause: > http://folding.stanford.edu/ > > > -- > AccessD mailing list > AccessD at databaseadvisors.com > http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/accessd > Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com > -- AccessD mailing list AccessD at databaseadvisors.com http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/accessd Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com