Do you mean like you've copied some data from a source (text file, email, etc.) and you want to paste it into a large text box on your Access form and then click a button and break that data down into the constituent fields? If that's the case, it's SO FUNNY that you ask that. I just did something exactly like this for myself. I initially did it in Access, but then I also ported it over to Excel.

Here's what I needed it for: I get an email from my credit card company with my daily sales. gross sales amount, fees, chargebacks, net sales, and the final deposit for the day. I wanted to be able to copy the text of that email, paste it into a big text box, and then parse it out into fields - first in Access, but then also into my Excel spreadsheet. So I wrote both.

I was thinking about making this a Template video and/or incorporating this into a Developer lesson, because it is VBA heavy. Would anyone else like to see how this works?

Let me ask you this: is the data something that YOU control, for example an email you get from your own web site where you can format the data like this:

[FN]Joe[/FN]
[LN]Smith[/LN]

Because that's the easiest way to handle it. If not, if it's an email you get from someone else, like I get from my bank, then you have to be a little more clever with parsing it. I get something with tables and all kinds of crap, but there are fortunately certain keywords I can look for to break it up.

It would be for searching for a customer, and if they're not "in the system", then I could transfer all the information to the appropriate text boxes where I can then save it as a new record to be able to find them later if needed.

OK. That's a lot easier. So you could just take the data you've already entered and insert it into a new record in the table. I see you're only an Expert user, so you haven't gotten into VBA yet, but this can be done with a few commands. Let's say your search form is SearchF and you're searching by FirstName and LastName, you could say:

DoCmd.OpenForm "CustomerF"
DoCmd.GoToRecord acDataForm, "CustomerF", acNewRec
Forms!CustomerF!FirstName = FirstName
Forms!CustomerF!LastName = LastName

That will open the CustomerF form, go to a blank new record, set the FirstName and LastName fields on the CustomerF form equal to FirstName and LastName on the CURRENT form. I cover a lot of this in Access Developer 1.

Hope this helps.