New Record In Table=Meaningless symbols in text field in Report (1 Viewer)

I have an issue that is driving me nuts!

My short question is: When I add ANY record to a Table I get meaningless symbols in a Text Field on my Report. How do I stop this? The details are below:



I have a Microsoft Access Database of College Football Teams and their Schedules that otherwise works just fine. In the past, I regularly added new teams to the Teams Table. I enter Team Name, Conference and Division affiliation (if any), whether or not they play home games on Grass or Turf and a hyperlink to the team's website.

This week, I went to add Fordham to my Teams Table, as Fordham plays at Temple this week. After I entered the information in the Table, I saved and ran the Compact and Repair Database tool. I went to run a Report that contains a text field called "Comments" that I enter non-indexed comments about the game manually in the Schedule Table or on a Form. Not all games have comments. However, as a result of entering Fordham in the Teams Table, I now get nothing but weird looking symbols that look like Wing-Dings or Chinese Script in the Comments column on the report. These symbols show up in each row under Comments, whether or not I actually have a comment in the field. These symbols also show up on the report no matter what team or time period I select on the Form that runs a Query that generates the Report. Fordham does not have anything to do with the results (I first noticed it when I ran a report detailing the history of Wisconsin and Arizona St.).

I isolated the problem to this addition of Fordham, because if I delete the Fordham record from the Teams Table, Save and Compact and Repair the Database, I can return to the normal looking text in the Comments Text Field in the Report. I tried only entering "Fordham" as the team name, disregarding any of the other information, like Conference, Division, playing surface or (most importantly) the hyperlink, but I get the same symbols. I also tried entering just a team name of something other than Fordham, but the same pesky symbols show up. I restored a previous version of this database before the problem showed up, but, when I added Fordham, I got the same result. I tried searching on this topic, but with little luck. There were a few things like making sure the hyperlink was not indexed or Unicode Compression was off, but nothing really more than that.

Any help in determining why when I add ANY record to a Table I get symbols in a Text Field on my Report would be greatly appreciated.

I'll bet the comments field is a memo field.

This can happen for some reason when grouping (which you can't do with memo fields) or linking on a comment field and/or if the table is linked - don't know why.

If you can, change the comment field to text(255) and also use Select Distinct or first rather than group by if you can


Here are some links

http://allenbrowne.com/bug-18.html
http://allenbrowne.com/ser-47.html#MemoContainsStrangeCharacters
http://www.pcreview.co.uk/forums/ms-access-database-chinese-characters-t1184640.html

Thanks CJ. I tried everything you suggested, but still yield the same results. When I change the Comments field to "First" from "Group By" in the Query, the Form asks me for a parameter value on Comments and will not let me continue to the report. The field is set as a LongText field in Table Design. Unicode Compression is off. The field is indexed with duplicates ok. Based on what I read in the links to your response, I suspect somehow the Report is trying to read the field as a data field and not a text field, but everything in the Properties box on the Report indicates it is a Text field. The only thing I did not try is to delete the Comments field from the database and re-enter the data. This was too drastic and cumbersome. What I still can't get my head around, is WHY does adding a Record to a Table trigger this problem? There is not even anything entered into the Comments field when the new Record is entered.

I got it. Turns out Memo = Long Text in Access 2013. I did not realize that until I researched a Microsoft link.


Thank you, CJ, for all your help.

glad to be of assistance