Query criteria for a look up field

[sarah]

Having much difficulty and after searching many sites I
think I found you can't do what I want but I can't believe
that's right... here's what I'm doing:
I have CustomerType and ReferralType fields. Both of
these text data types and are ComboBox lookup fields to
ease the entering of data. I want to create a qry that
yields all customer type Retail (example). My query yields
none. If I change the field type to a Text Box it works
fine. Is it true I lose the benefit of easier and cleaner
data entry for the sake of getting data out?
Puh-leeze.. tell me I'm wrong and I can get what I need.

 

[tina]

that's one of the many drawbacks of putting Lookup fields in tables. see
http://www.mvps.org/access/lookupfields.htm
for more info.
tables are not really for data entry anyway. that's what forms are for.
suggest you change the Lookup fields in your tables to textboxes. then
create a form to do your data entry. use the Controls Wizard in form design
view to create combo boxes for those fields where you want to "look up" data
from another table. end result is that you'll still be able to do your data
entry quickly and easily and will also avoid the problems associated with
table Lookup fields.
in a query, you can link the "lookup" table(s) to the data table(s), so that
you can query by the values you're using to seeing in combo box droplists,
rather than by primary key values.

hth