I have a table, in the table there are fields that have numbers of vents needed for a particular house. (e.g. vent type 1, vent type 2, vent type 3, etc. about 40 different types) The fields are numeric and the field name is a description of the vent. Now I want to add another field that totals all these fields so I know how many vents are on a house. What is the formula. I have tried "=[vent1] + [vent2] + [vent3]" . But when one of those fields has nothing in it, the answere field is blank. Oh by the way, I am new at access, but fluent on Lotus Approach.

Sound like you are encountering null values. Is it possible that you first had the vent fields datatype set as text, then later changed them to Integers? If this is the case you saved some of the entries as null values if they were left blank during data entry. In the table the fields should be Integer datatype and the default value should be 0 (zero). If your existing data contains nulls these will need to be converted to 0 (zeros).

HTH
RDH

[This message has been edited by R. Hicks (edited 02-11-2000).]