Updating blank cells

[Janice]

Hi all-I seem to have gone blank on this one!

I have a table in which one of the columns has numerous blank cell
entries (but not all) which I would like to replace with specific text
(table format is set up for that already). I would like to select the
blank cells and update them.

Thanks
Janice

[Eric Gagnon]

go under Query
Then Select
Choose your table
then click the assist button
in the expression window type:

yourcolumn=""

this should select all blank record.

then update your query with the value you want


You could alway use the search and replace function


Eric

[David R Sherrod]

Janice, add this little warnings to Eric's advice, because I've kicked myself for the mistakes.

When you do the second part, which is TABLE-->Update Column, be sure to select the recent QUERY table, because you only want to add your new text to the blank cells, yes?  You'd like the home table to retain existing text that might have been in that column.  Trip up here (the MI default first table at top of list, not the Query table), and you'll probably be overwriting something that you hadn't meant to kick.  Maybe not even something in the table you started searching within.

The two quote marks have no space between them in the first part (QUERY-->SQL Select) because you're asking for any cells in the column that are blank.

Dave Sherrod
-----------------------------------------

From:	Eric Gagnon <eric....@maptica.com>
To:	mapi...@googlegroups.com
Date:	04/06/2009 02:32 PM
Subject:	[MI-L] Re: Updating blank cells
Sent by:	mapi...@googlegroups.com

---

[Janice]

Thanks all-that will do the trick! And thanks for the warnings.

J.

> go under Query
> Then Select
> Choose your table
> then click the assist button
> in the expression window type:
>
> yourcolumn=""
>
> this should select all blank record.
>
> then update your query with the value you want
>
> You could alway use the search and replace function
>
> Eric
>
>
>
> Janice wrote:
> > Hi all-I seem to have gone blank on this one!
>
> > I have a table in which one of the columns has numerous blank cell
> > entries (but not all) which I would like to replace with specific text
> > (table format is set up for that already).  I would like to select the
> > blank cells and update them.
>
> > Thanks

> > Janice- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -

[Eric Gagnon]

Thank you David for specifying that's it's the query table..
You do have to be very careful while doing this..


This is really a good group.. everybody is watching up for one another.

Eric

[MattC]

Also, along the same lines - remember that a blank or null cell is not
nescessarily the same as a "0" value when querying something the is
not a character type.

[Cummings, Mike]

Whenever I do operations that I haven’t done before, I test it out on a copy of the file.  So if I do mess up; I still have the original file of data.