I created the wrong field-type – how do I change it?

If you created a wrong fieldtype, you can normally not just change it; ie. perhaps you have created a text-field with the values “Yes”, “No” or “Maybe”, which you really wanted to have as a picklist, as this makes it easier to use in filters etc.

In this case, one approach will be to:

1) Make the new picklist with the appropriate values (“Yes”, “No” & “Maybe”)
2) Make a filter where you select all the entries in the module with the first value (“Yes” in our case).
3) Apply the filter (remember to select all, not just the visible entries), use Mass-edit to make all the selected entries to have the option “Yes” selected in the new picklist.

Repeat steps 2 & 3 until all records have the appropriate picklists, and then it should be safe to delete the old text-field. You can of course also delete the temporary filter(s) you created. You can download the full data as CSV file first in case you want backup.

This solution might seem like it will take long time, but in practice it will typically take 30 secs pr value in the picklists, ie. normally less than 5 minutes.