Knowledge Base

Error message when you try to define a filter in Visio Professional 2007: "A filter cannot be added to this column"

Article ID: 941709

Article Last Modified on 8/30/2007

APPLIES TO

SYMPTOMS

When you try to define filter criteria to import a data source in Microsoft Office Visio Professional 2007, you receive the following error message:

A filter cannot be added to this column.

This problem may occur for of one or more of the following reasons:

The data type of the selected filter column is unsupported. Columns that contain binary text or large text, such as a Memo field in a Microsoft Office Access database, cannot be used as filter columns.

Unsupported fields include the following fields :

- Access: Memo
- Oracle: Long data type
- OLE DB or ODBC data source: Any data type that cannot be sorted or indexed. For more information, see the documentation for the data source.
The Compare to value for the filter contains unsupported characters or characters in unsupported languages. In particular, East Asian languages that have characters in full-width mode may cause this problem.
The filter criteria contain out-of-range numbers or dates. Each data source and data type can have different size limits. See the documentation of the data source for information about the range that is supported for each data type. For example, Microsoft SQL Server 2005 supports date types that range from January 1, 1753, to December 31, 9999.

To resolve this problem, use one of the following methods:

Check for unsupported data types in the filter criteria. If it is possible, convert the unsupported data types in the data source to supported data types.
Check for unsupported languages or characters in the filter criteria. Then, remove or replace those characters. For East Asian languages, the problem may be resolved if you set the Input Method Editor (IME) input mode to half-width.
Make sure that numeric values and date values do not exceed the range that is supported by the data type for the data source.

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a bug in the Microsoft products that are listed in the "Applies to" section.

Keywords: kbtshoot kbprb kbexpertisebeginner KB941709