How to find longest string in the table column data

The easiest way is:

select top 1 CRfrom table torder by len(CR) desc

Note that this will only return one value if there are multiple with the same longest length.

You can:

SELECT CR FROM table1 WHERE len(CR) = (SELECT max(len(CR)) FROM table1)

Having just recieved an upvote more than a year after posting this, I'd like to add some information.

• This query gives all values with the maximum length. With a TOP 1 query you get only one of these, which is usually not desired.
• This query must probably read the table twice: a full table scan to get the maximum length and another full table scan to get all values of that length. These operations, however, are very simple operations and hence rather fast. With a TOP 1 query a DBMS reads all records from the table and then sorts them. So the table is read only once, but a sort operation on a whole table is quite some task and can be very slow on large tables.
• One would usually add DISTINCT to my query (SELECT DISTINCT CR FROM ...), so as to get every value just once. That would be a sort operation, but only on the few records already found. Again, no big deal.
• If the string lengths have to be dealt with quite often, one might think of creating a computed column (calculated field) for it. This is available as of Ms Access 2010. But reading up on this shows that you cannot index calculated fields in MS Access. As long as this holds true, there is hardly any benefit from them. Applying LEN on the strings is usually not what makes such queries slow.

You can get it like this:

SELECT TOP 1 CRFROM tblORDER BY len(CR) DESC

but i'm sure, there is a more elegant way to do it