Need help reformatting imported fields

[starl]

Had a > 2million rows text file I brought into Access. Brought it in fine, except 2 things
1. I formatted certain columns for Long Integer. Some have 0s, some are blanks. It reported some of the blank cells as formatting errors: How can quickly put 0s in the blank fields? Or will it not matter when I query?
2. There are date columns formatted as dd-mmm-yy, for example 01-JUNE-74 and 23-JAN-02. These came in as text but I'd prefer if they were formatted as proper dates. How can I do this?

I'm an absolute amateur with Access, so hand holding is required. I do generate SQL queries in Excel to Access, so that I can do some. Matter of fact, I plan on querying for just the desired records and bringing them into Excel... perhaps that would be the easiest way to clean up? But if Access can do it, I'd like to learn.

thanks

 

[welshgasman]

Update field with a Value of 0 where field is null. Or you can just use NZ() in queries.
Look at the field in table design, if date, then it is just formatting. If text, again use an Update query to convert a NEW field which is Date/Time to Date, and use that instead. Use CDate() for that.

 

[welshgasman]

Be careful with the date conversion, depending how far back you dates go.
For both queries, create as a Select and view the result, before switching to Update query.