Dave, I'm not sure how much you know so if some of this doesn't makes sense,
just say.
Let's say that you have a table about garden plants and one of the fields
ColourID is a number which is linked from a table called Colours which has
an Autonumber field called ColourID and then a Colour field which lists
different colours.
You make a form by clicking on your Plants table, going to Insert, Form. But
your form has ColourID, a number field. You want the actual colour. So you
click on the View button and go to Design view.
Make sure that the Wizard button is pressed in.
Click on the Combo box on the Toolbar and click back on your form. You will
get a choice of options. In a case like this you would choose
'I want the combo box to look up the values...'
You would go to your Colour table in the list that appears. You would choose
BOTH the ColourID field and the Colour field. In the next window you will
see that the ColourID field has been hidden. You click next, choose the
label Colour for your combo box and there it is in your form.
When you type in a new plant and want to choose its colour, you would click
on the combo, choose the colour from the list and and its name would appear
in the form while its ColourID number is quietly stored in your Plant table.
If you enter a plant where the colour isn't in the list you already have,
you would type the new colour into your colour table so that it would now be
added to the list of other colours available. There are all sorts of other
things you can do - this is just a bare intro.
Evi
