Creating a unique ID

[Guest]

I am trying to automatically assign ID's to a list of contacts in a table
based on several other fields in that same table. Is there a way to assign,
to new entries in the table, a unique ID that would be composed of their
first initial, the first 5 letters of their last name, and 3 characters from
a third field? I would appreciate any help on this matter, as it is getting
to be very tiresome manually inputting such a combination for several hundred
entries. Thank you.

 

[Arvin Meyer [MVP]]

It's not a good idea to actually build a field that's calculated from other
fields. For instance, what happens when Judy Smith gets married and becomes
Judy Johnson? How about a conflict with Jim Johnson as well?

You can build a query column that does what you want, just to see if there's
a conflict. That won't help with name changes though.

Expr1: Left([FirstName],1) & Left([LastName], 5) & Left([ThirdField], 3)