Playing the field

Monarch lets you add real value to the existing, already useful data you’ve captured and extracted from your reports with its calculated fields feature. To use calculated fields to your best advantage, you need to understand the types of data you can create, and how to handle your calculations so that you can work within the structures that Monarch makes available.

With that we today begin a series looking at calculated fields. We’ll start by looking at the field types, then we’ll tackle the function we have available to make sure that we give Monarch the end results it expects, so that you never again have to see an “Operand error” and wonder what in the blue blazes is wrong.

Crunch the numbers

The first field type is Numeric. This field type only accepts numbers so don’t try to store anything that isn’t a number with this type of field or return the result of any expression that isn’t numeric. You can specify up to nine decimal places.

Depth of Character

The next field type is called Character. This field type accepts in its contents any series of letters, number, punctuation, and any other symbol you can throw at it. There’s a maximum of 254 characters in a field though.

On This Day in History

Date/Time fields store exactly that: dates and times.

You must be careful that the expressions used in your calculated fields resolve to a date type. You might need to use a conversion function such as CtoD.

Take a Memo

When you need to store more data than the Character type allows, it’s time to use a Memo field. Memo fields allow for a lot of data: over 65,000 characters! Numbers, letters, symbols - they’re all fair game for Memo fields.

Master understanding of these data types when defining fields and you’ll be well on your way to excelling with Monarch.