how to "fill data series" in Access?

[emandel]

In excel, I am able to select a whole bunch of cells in one column and copy the data from one cell to the lot of them. Is it possible to do this in access? Is it possible to enter the same date to many fields at once?

[Stewart Ross]

Relational databases such as Access work in entirely different ways to Excel. There is no 'fill-down' (or fill-right for that matter) feature which can replicate what can be done in Excel, nor is there any reason why there would be.

If you could explain what it is you are trying to achieve we may be able to assist (for example by the use of an SQL INSERT or UPDATE statement, or by recordset processing), but without clarification of what you are trying to do we'd just be guessing.


-Stewart

[Brian Connelly]

Agreeing with Stewart, more clarification is needed on what you are trying to accomplish. Excel and Access are completely different programs of the Microsoft suite and have different purposes and are intended to be used different things.

[emandel]

OK fair enough.

so lets say I have a list of people and I selected all of the people whose name begins with the letter R and I used that list for something, lets say I printed a letter to them. I now want to flag all of them, so I created a new yes/no field and I want to "check" off all 150 of the records that are applicable. Is there any way for me to do that without going to each record and selecting them individually?
Hope that makes sense.

[Mariostg]

I am not sure I decipher completely what you want to accomplish, but maybe this will inspire you:

UPDATE MyTable
SET MyFieldtoMark = "Printed"
WHERE left(MyFieldLastName,1)="R"

[Stewart Ross]

Multi-record updates such as the one you mention can be done with an update query, but you would have to be precise about the criteria used to select the records for update, otherwise you would end up modifying the wrong set of data. I would not recommend the ad-hoc approach you have mentioned in your example, but if you had to do such an update in SQL here is an exemplar (with made-up field and table names, of course)

UPDATE tblPeople SET letter_sent = True
WHERE Left(Person_Surname, 1)='R';

-Stewart

PS mariostg got there first!

[emandel]

Is there anyway to do it within the table view itself and not go to the code side of things. The "r" was just one example. I want to be able to select a bunch of records and change the data in one field in all of those records all at once.

[NeoPa]

Only clumsily. You could select each desired record, which would involve updating them all anyway, then you could reprocess through the form's associated recordset setting the controls to whatever you want. For a number of reasons I would not recommend this.

Remember, if you're in a form environment and make a multiple update using SQL, you will need to call .Refresh (or .Requery) after it's completed in order for the changes to be reflected in your form.