Error in Creating Calculated Field

[alphaorionis57]

My database (Access 2003) has a table which contains employee-wise,
month-wise activity-wise (knowledge management, Administrative tasks, Idle,
etc) data.
Using a cross-tab query I am able to analyse what is the time spent by each
employee, each month amongst different activities.
Since the number of activities is large and some of them are partly
overlapping I require to combine some of the columns in the cross-tab query.
However, when I tried to create a calculated field in a separate select
query based on the cross - tab query to combine the activities "Leave" and
"Leave (part of the day)", the calculated field returned a value only when
there were values for both the fields in the cross - tab query and not when
either one of them was blank.
How do I ensure that calculated field sums the two columns irrespective of
whether one of them is blank?

 

[BruceM]

It may be that the Nz function will take care of the problem:
NewField: Nz([Field1],0) + Nz([Field2],0)
See help for more information about Nz. The problem may come when one of
the fields is Null, which can be thought of as Unknown. Unknown plus a
number is still Unknown. Nz converts the null to 0.

It usually helps when posting a problem such as this to show exactly what
you have tried (in this case, the expression that did not produce the
intended result).