In one of my Q&A databases I have a field which was supposed to contain yes/no information when I designed it.  One of my users told me he wanted to put additional notes into it, so I changed it to a Text field.

After translating it I tried an experiment and changed the field type to Boolean.  All the Yes'es changed to 1 and all the No's changed to 0.  Fine.  But everything with text changed to ÿ.

I have since changed the field type back to text, so that later when I import data I'll get the notes.  But for right now there are some things puzzling me.

When I do a Table View, these ÿ characters are not visible.  Nor do I find any records when I use ÿ as a search criteria, so I can't do a Mass Update to delete them.  Sesame is storing the character as something because when I search for empty fields they are not found.

I'm just curious about this...it's actually moot because "real" data will replace all of it some time in the future.  But it would be interesting to know what's going on in case something similar which does matter comes up in the future.

I changed the Field type (I don't know how to change a LE type).  I used the Manage A Database - Field Manager.

I'll have to read up on Boolean fields; I didn't know it was a 3-state field.   That's very interesting.

I tried searching the field for -1 but didn't get any returns.

I finally found a way to retreive just the records which contain the ÿ character.  I discovered "Inverted Search" and specified all other entries as search criteria.

SESAME RULES!