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Microsoft Access Graph Legend Issue

Hi Experts. I have a frustrating issue. I have a graph of instances by machine. One of the Machines is named 10/17. Others are similarly named. In the graph legend for 10/17 it is displaying Oct-17. I made the data source for the graph a temporary table so I could fool around with the data to see if I could get this to display right. When I added spaces to the data making 10/17 - 10 / 17 -- it still displayed as Oct-17. When I changed it to: m10/17 it displayed as m10/17. The machines named 16/17 display correctly since it can't be converted to a month and day. Any ideas?

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Eileen Murphy

ASKER

The space preceding the value didn't work in a report/graph. BUT I replaced the slash (/) with a pipe (|) and that works. Thanks for the help. Appreciate it. Here's a screen shot showing where the space before the data didn't work for a report (but did for the form) -- >

Eileen Murphy

ASKER

As always, thank you!!!

NerdsOfTech

Just to add in here an explanation in case another system name will duplicate this issue:

The reason why the graph showed Oct-27 is because the "general" data field that contained 10/27 resembled a date and was cast as a date in the graph; also, since there isn't a 16th month, 16/17 was not interpreted as a date.

Ergo, any character other than "/" and "-" like pipe "|" would keep the data as text instead of be dynamically cast as a date. This also goes for adding a letter, such as m to the data.

There probably is a way to force the graph to display 10/27 with an ' apostrophe in front of the data; or the data column should be cast as text type (as general/variant would attempt to interpret/cast data dynamically into whichever type it thinks the data is in).

'10/27

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Assuming it works the same as excel that is