You Can't Calculate Totals on that!...SO #@!%#! WHAT, YOU GREAT PILE OF !@#

Question

In Access you have an asterix which represents every field in the table. Useful if you want to see all the data in a table for a single record. I've done it a million times before.
So why is it telling me that I can't calculate totals on the *, so I should remove it from the query grid and replace it with the fields I want and calculate totals then.
I DON'T WANT TO CALCULATE ANY #!@%#@!! TOTALS!!
I AM PUTTING THE FIELDS I #@!%$#! WANT - I WANT ALL OF THEM!! I JUST DON'T WANT TO DOUBLE CLICK 30 TIMES WHEN ONCE WILL DO!
It's driving me insane because I'm going through hundreds of Oracle tables and it takes so long to browse to the record I'm looking for and it should work to use the asterix, I've done it so many times before.
How do I override this utterly unhelpful behaviour? Am I stuck in some sort of "Queries will only calculate Totals! mode that I don't know about?
I know, I know, Access is a micro$loth invention, not Oracle, but we have to use an ODBC link to the SQL database via Acces and it's going to kill me.
Unless I slam my PC into my neighbour's head first!
Any help greatly apprciated.
Sorry for the rant!
Cheers
IsNull

Answer 1

IsNull wrote:
Cheers,
I am serious and I know this isn't an Access site, and I know there are differences between SQL in Access and SQL in Oracle, and I'm trying to get funding to do some proper SQL and VBA training, but if anyone can help I'd be very grateful.What? with the funding? Sorry, there's a credit crisis doncha know! ;)
In the Access/ODBC/Oracle query design view you can create a query by linking fields in tables and then choosing fields you want to output in the query results. At the top of each table is an asterix which uses all the fields from the entire table in a query and outputs the data from all the fields. I'm looking through various tables to find useful fields and using one particular record as my example so I get consistent data output.
Now, I can look in the actual linked tables and see what they contain, but I want the data for a single record, not the general table contents and there are hundreds of thousands of records. So I'm using the query design to search for the data for a single record and using only one table per query. But if I double click on the asterix to indicate "Use All Fields from this Tabel" I get the "But you can't calculate totals on that!" message. If I add them all individually I get an "Illegal use of LONG data".I once looked at Access, many moons ago. Didn't like it.
However, from what you describe, it would seem that you need to somehow join the tables as you're doing, but also apply some restrictions on the data so that you're not trying to retieve all the rows back. As for it's error complaining about the totals, I would expect something like you've got an aggregate function in there and things aren't being grouped together. Either that or there's some "setting" somewhere that automatically tries to total things, which hopefully you could turn off. The best thing is to take the error message/number and lookup what that means via some website/documentation that lists Access errors and how to resolve them.
You'll be lucky to find anyone here who will know (or care about) Access.