I have supplier names in a tables that are empty. Is there a way to search for those records using the search criteria? A special keyword maybe?
I thought about using a new field with a formula like "If field is null or ="" then yes else no" and then use the new field search for yes but it's a bit heavy, especially if you want to do that on several fields.
Thank you.
Pascal - We will be adding a more formal solution to this for Sidebar filtering of text fields in a future version, but until now, we used the convention that entering a blank space in a Sidebar text search box should return the nulls as well. Unfortunately, a bug was introduced that had stopped this from working properly...we have introduced the fix into the latest build of 2.6. A workaround for non-text Numeric, Date/Times or Category data types is to use the Bar View and do a Move/Keep on the 'null' bar that should be displayed.
If you want to have a single formula field which allows you to test a single field for NULL values, then you could use a variable to help keep things [relatively!] neat and tidy - for example:
1. Create a new Variable of type "Text choice"
2. Add values to the variable which correspond to the fields you want to test for NULL
3. Add a formula field which checks the value of the variable to see which field to test for NULL (this will be tested on every row)
4. Optional - add a second formula field which uses SUBSET functions to test for the existence of any NULL values
The attached file demonstrates this - it's pretty simplistic, but the approach will work on any number of fields in any size file (changing fields via the "Test for nulls in" variable will result in a delay on very large data sets - be warned!)