Ok, I'm absolutely positive I'm missing something totally simple here... Someone give me a clue...
I have a database whereby I track academic performance of students in our program. I am trying to use last year's table to calculate how many hours each student earned during all three semesters.
In many cases, students did not enroll in all three semesters, so I am dealing with Null values in many of the fields. The easiest way would be to do something with the Nz function such as follows:
HrsEarnedLastAY: Sum(Nz([HrsEarnedFall],0)+Nz([HrsEarnedSpring],0)+Nz([HrsEarnedSummer],0))
But what I am getting is the numbers in a string! Say, a student earned 12 hours in the fall, and 10 hours in the spring, and didn't attend at all in the summer. The answer I'm getting in the calculated field is 1210, rather than 22. I've tried about 50 permutations of the above expression and I truly can't see why it isn't adding the fields together... I have also tried this with parenthesis around each Nz: (Nz([HrsEarnedFall],0)) , same result.
The Sum function does not recognize Null fields, but I thought I could use the Nz function to account for that. If I can't use Nz with Sum, how the heck do I add these numbers?
What I need to do is create a table with these hours totaled, and then update my main table from it. I could conceivably add the fields together in a report, but then I don't have any way to update my main table other than simple data entry.
I really do not want to have to go back into almost 700 records and add in zeros in multiple fields just because I'm missing something stupid.
You'd think an application as powerful as Access would be able to add 2+2 and get 4...
Any help would be most appreciated...
I have a database whereby I track academic performance of students in our program. I am trying to use last year's table to calculate how many hours each student earned during all three semesters.
In many cases, students did not enroll in all three semesters, so I am dealing with Null values in many of the fields. The easiest way would be to do something with the Nz function such as follows:
HrsEarnedLastAY: Sum(Nz([HrsEarnedFall],0)+Nz([HrsEarnedSpring],0)+Nz([HrsEarnedSummer],0))
But what I am getting is the numbers in a string! Say, a student earned 12 hours in the fall, and 10 hours in the spring, and didn't attend at all in the summer. The answer I'm getting in the calculated field is 1210, rather than 22. I've tried about 50 permutations of the above expression and I truly can't see why it isn't adding the fields together... I have also tried this with parenthesis around each Nz: (Nz([HrsEarnedFall],0)) , same result.
The Sum function does not recognize Null fields, but I thought I could use the Nz function to account for that. If I can't use Nz with Sum, how the heck do I add these numbers?
What I need to do is create a table with these hours totaled, and then update my main table from it. I could conceivably add the fields together in a report, but then I don't have any way to update my main table other than simple data entry.
I really do not want to have to go back into almost 700 records and add in zeros in multiple fields just because I'm missing something stupid.
You'd think an application as powerful as Access would be able to add 2+2 and get 4...
Any help would be most appreciated...
