Unable to sort memo fields?

rafi2

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A quick question... is it possible to sort a table by a memo field? I have a table and am able to sort by other, non-memo fields, however when I place my cursor in the memo fielld I would like to sort, the sorting option becomes 'greyed-out'. Is there a way around this?
 
Er think the answers are No and No. No you cannot sort on a memo and No there is not a workaround unless you change it to a text field but that chops anything over 255 chars

Len
 
Hmm...that's a bit frustrating.

Thanks for the quick response!
 
What are you storing in a memo field that you need to sort on? Perhaps it shouldn't be stored there.
 
I'm storing anything from a single word to multiple paragraphs of text in the memo field. I wasn't looking for anything in particular by the sorting. Just hoping to be able to eyeball the table by scrolling through it to see what kind of data has been entered in there, as in some instances, the first word has some relevance not captured by other fields in the table.

What I ended up doing was temporarily creating a new text field and copying the memo data (albeit truncated) over to it via an update query. I then used this text field to sort the table.
 
I did the same as Rafi : in a Query I add an additional expression which is equal to, for example, the 15 first characters of the memo field. Function Left(...) + sort option.
Nothing more.
gki
 
i know the thread is closed, but could any of you give me a sample query i new to this.
 
have a query and instead of dragging in the memofield, put the formula = left(memofield, 15) (or any other value)

this will just give you the first few characters, but you WILL probably be able to sort the smaller detail, if that helps

the thing is, that memo fields are implemented as just being notes if you will, and are not sortable (and generally sorting them would be superfluous). Maybe an MS oversight, but thats the way it is - however, it's surely very inefficient to sort such potentially long strings, and that's probably why.
 

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