How can I allow < or > in a number field?

[water quality]

I'm building a database for water quality data and am having trouble entering
a number that is below a certain limit. In most cases, I need to enter a
value similar to something like < 0.005. Can anyone help? I could simply
change fields to text fields - instead of numbers - but I'm not certain if
the data will be of any use if it is changed to a text type.

 

[KARL DEWEY]

< 0.005 is not a number.

 

[Brendan Reynolds]

You can't.

You could use two fields. One numeric field to store the number, and another
text field to store ">", "<", or "=".

Whether that makes more sense than using one text field probably depends on
what sort of operations you might want to perform on the data. I'm not sure
what kind of numeric operations on a mix of absolute and relative data would
make sense, but then, I'm no mathematician!

 

[John Vinson]

I'm building a database for water quality data and am having trouble entering
a number that is below a certain limit. In most cases, I need to enter a
value similar to something like < 0.005. Can anyone help? I could simply
change fields to text fields - instead of numbers - but I'm not certain if
the data will be of any use if it is changed to a text type.

What is the average of .010, .025, < 0.005, and .005?

As noted elsethread - you cannot, should not, store non-numeric data
such as < in a numeric field.


John W. Vinson[MVP]