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Message: [QUOTE="Jamie Richards, post: 4998672"] Hi Karen, A couple of suggestions for you. First go to Dev Ashish's Access Web ([URL]http://www.mvps.org/access/strings/str0001.htm[/URL]) and get info on parsing strings, that will help you with separating out the names. Secondly...Hmmmm. Why not copy all the existing data from 2 of the databases into the tables of the third database (make back-ups first). Add the Departments table you spoke of and assign an ID of some sort to each department in that table - make it the primary key. Then create the DepartmentID field as a foreign key in every table that you need to relate department data to. Use SQL to insert the appropriate "new" department ID's against each record, based on whatever criteria you can find to identify a record as belonging to a particular department. The big problem will arise if you cannot identify which records to assign to your various departments. If you find that to be the case, BEFORE you merge the three databases, create a dummy "DepartmentID" field in the current database tables and assign it a value, but make sure every record has that same value applied. Do this for each of the three databases. Then copy all the data from 2 of the db's into the matching tables in the one remaining. (This is sounding dreadful isn't it?) Example: [tblEmployees] EmployeeNumber (PK) DepartmentID (FK) <-- add this field and assign it a value...The number 1 will do (for ALL records)! FirstName LastName DateOfHire TerminationDate Do this for each table that will need relating to the new Departments table. When you do the next database, change the number you add to something else (2 sounds good!). Finally, do the same for the third database. If you don't want to use those ID's for the departments you can change them to something more meaningful later. The important thing is you now have some way of identifying which department owns what records. Kind of messy, but it might be a strating point? Jamie [/QUOTE]

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