Access Phone Number issue after importing from Outlook

[Sam Gosdin]

I have recently imported all of our contacts from the
contacts in Outlook into Access. After importing, I
noticed all the phone number/fax number fields were
automatically set to text data type. After further
review, I discovered that every phone number had been
entered into Outlook with a / such as 123/456-7890.
Because of the slash after the number, I am unable to
convert this field to a phone/fax data type (which I must
do so that I can do some appends/merges with other
tables). Is there are way to convert these without having
to edit each record? I have over 3000 records that would
need to be individually updated. PLEASE HELP!!!

 

[Glen Appleton]

Hi Sam,

Use an update query with the Replace function in the field definition. For
example:

NewPhone: Replace([OldPhone], "/", "-")

This will replace every instance of the slash with a dash, and then you
should be able to change the data type.

Hope this helps,
- Glen