Paula, I cover the OnNotInList event in Access 324, which I see you've taken. Unfortunately, if your combo box is BOUND to a field with an ID, there isn't any way you can NOT add the item to the related table and still show the value in the combo box.

You can do this if you are storing the value as TEXT in your table, and not a related ID. Create the combo box as normal, but instead of making the first column the ID value as I've always shown you, make the first column the VISIBLE text. Then store this in your field.

For example, let's say you've got a list of favorite movies. We'll call it MovieT. Each movie has an ID and MovieName.

Now in your employee table, EmployeeT, you want to store each employee's favorite  movie, but you don't want to limit it to the list. So, you make a FavoriteMovie field which is a TEXT field.

Now, on your Employee form, make a combo box that's bound to FavoriteMovie, and have it get it's list of values from the MovieT, but you WON'T be pulling the ID into the box. You're storing JUST the text. Now you can turn LimitToList off, and type the value in straight into the box if the value isn't in the list.

The DOWN SIDE to this is that you no longer have a relationship, and you'll be storing extra data (possibly redundant data) in your Employee table.

The PLUS SIDE is that users can pick from the list OR type in whatever they want.

Does this help?