Help

The Community will be temporarily unavailable starting on Friday February 28. We’ll be back as soon as we can! To learn more, check out our Announcements blog post.

How can I see if a field is empty or not?

Topic Labels: Formulas
Solved
Jump to Solution
4650 5
cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

What’s wrong with this formula? It references a single field named ‘Date’. That field usually will have a valid date in it, but in some cases the field might be left empty. In a separate formula field I’m trying to use this formula but it’s not working.

IF ( Date = BLANK(), “Date Missing”, DATETIME_FORMAT(Date,‘YYYYMMDD’) )

What’s wrong with that? How else do I test to see if a field is empty?

William

1 Solution

Accepted Solutions
kuovonne
18 - Pluto
18 - Pluto

Airtable formulas are really picky on syntax.
Remove the space between IF and the opening parenthesis.

IF( Date = BLANK(), "Date Missing", DATETIME_FORMAT(Date,'YYYYMMDD') )

See Solution in Thread

5 Replies 5
kuovonne
18 - Pluto
18 - Pluto

Airtable formulas are really picky on syntax.
Remove the space between IF and the opening parenthesis.

IF( Date = BLANK(), "Date Missing", DATETIME_FORMAT(Date,'YYYYMMDD') )

THANK YOU – that was it! I’m going to have to review the formula reference again because I missed this tip if it’s in there.

William

You can also use a slightly more concise notation to check for an entry on any field:

IF(NOT(Date), 'Date missing', 'Date entered')

or the inverse:

IF(Date, 'Date entered', 'Date missing')

or more generally:

IF({Field Name}, ...)

JB

Just be careful with this for numeric fields. The IF statement will treat the number zero as false, and may not produce the result you want. For numeric fields `IF({field} = BLANK(), …) is safer.

You also need to be careful if you are chaining formula fields that return empty strings.

Ah, thanks for that tip. And I do understand that this should be avoided with number fields (since a zero in the field will get interpretated as a false or empty).

FileMaker has an IsEmpty() function, so in FileMaker I’d write this calc

If ( IsEmpty ( DateField) ; "Date missing" ; "Yep, there's a value in the Date field!" )

I’m trying to learn how to do same thing in Airtable. I was using “If ( Date=BLANK()…” and the results weren’t reliable. I thought that I might be misusing the BLANK() funciton, but Kuovonne set me straight by commenting that there can’t be a space between the “IF” and the open parenthesis.

Thanks to you both.

William