Sorting Memo fields

[ratford2]

Good Morning,
I am trying to do something rather simple. sort using a memo field in Access 2007.
My question is how do you sort a memo field WITHOUT using a query?

Ray

 

[Dairy Farmer]

Oen the Table in View mode.
Go to the column that has the Memo
Next to the column lable is a down pointing triangle (slipped my mind what they are called)
Click on this down pointing triangle
Use one of the options (AtoZ, ZtoA)

 

[ratford2]

That would make since but it does not work. the sort is grayed out.

Thank you,
Ray

 

[gemma-the-husky]

you cannot sort a memo field

you may be able to use a query, and have a column saying left(mymemo, 10) say - and that column may be sortable - but i am not sure without trying

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i suspect access stores pointers to memos, rather than the memo object itself, and cant sort those in the same way that sorts other data types.

 

[vbaInet]

Like Dave mentioned it should work. To increase the precision of the sort order, sort by the first 127 characters.

ORDER BY Left(MemoField, 127) ASC

 

[ratford2]

I have been doing that way but it is not the way I did it in previous versions of access. Why should I have to make a query just to sort a table via a memo field? It makes no since.

 

[boblarson]

I have been doing that way but it is not the way I did it in previous versions of access. Why should I have to make a query just to sort a table via a memo field? It makes no since.

Don't know about previous versions of Access but I thought even they couldn't sort on a memo field since it can hold up to 2 million characters (if set in VBA - ~65,000 if done through the form). And that could potentially be hazardous to the CPU runtime of the computer and to the operator.

In other words depending on the number of records it could take a very long time to do. So, it doesn't allow it.

 

[ratford2]

Don't know about previous versions of Access but I thought even they couldn't sort on a memo field since it can hold up to 2 million characters (if set in VBA - ~65,000 if done through the form). And that could potentially be hazardous to the CPU runtime of the computer and to the operator.

In other words depending on the number of records it could take a very long time to do. So, it doesn't allow it.

Thanks Bob,

I have been sorting using memo fields for years till i installed 07.

Ray

 

[boblarson]

Well, it might be a fix they implemented because it really shouldn't have been able to do so. They have fixed some things in 2007 and 2010 which were not good things to do (although they've left others). Go figure.