title: Update query in Access to update MANY columns from Null to value
body: <p>I have a database table with about 100 columns (bulky, I know). I have about half of these columns which I will need to update iteratively to set Is Null or "" values to "TBD". </p>
  
  <p>I compiled all 50 some columns which need to be updated into an update query with Access SQL code that looked something like this...</p>
  
  <pre><code>UPDATE tablename
  SET tablename.column1="TBD", tablename.column2="TBD", tablename.column3="TBD"....
  WHERE tablename.column1 Is Null OR tablename.column1="" OR tablename.column2 Is Null OR tablename.column2="" OR tablename.column3 Is Null OR tablename.column3=""....
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Two issues: This query with 50 columns receives a "query is too complex" error.</p>
  
  <p>This query is also just functionally wrong...because I'm losing data within these columns due to the WHERE statement. Records that had values populated which I did not want to update are being updated because of the OR clause.</p>
  
  <p><strong>My question is how can I go about updating all of these columns and setting their null or empty values to a particular value (in this case, "TBD")?</strong></p>
  
  <p>I know that I can just use a select query to select the columns I need to update, run it, and just CTRL+H to find &amp; replace "" to "TBD". However, I'm worried about the potential for this to introduce errors into my dataset. I also know I could also go through column by column and update these values via an update query. However, this would be quite time consuming with 50+ columns &amp; the iterative updates which I need to run on the entire dataset.</p>
  
  <p>I'm leaning towards this latter route. I am still wondering if there are any other scripted options which I can build into a query to overcome such an issue, and that leads me here to you.</p>
  
  <p>Thank you!</p>