obivous answer

[neilb]

Hi

I am just starting to use access and write a very simple query but I can not seem to get the criteria to work with the wildcard option

What I have is loads of rows witha cell that has 3 numbers in a cell. The numbers can only start with a 1 or 2 or 3. I want to give the user the option to choose what number.

As far as I can get is

Like "[Please enter the first number]*"

but this does not work.

Whats wrong with this?

 

[LTunnicliffe]

What you are going to have to do is create a new column of all of the first numbers of you long numbers. There is a function "Str" that converts a number to a string, then you can take the left most number and filter by that. One thing I didn't know about Str until I investigated this, is that Str has a leading space before the number for the sign of the number. I could not figure out why left(Str(100),1) was return " " but I looked in the help and it told me. Anyway I had to use the the Mid function to get the first number.

FirstNum: Mid(Str([Num]),2,1)

Hope this helps!