Richard, I was just relating my experience with building various combos and I shoulda taken your advice that I've since come across .i.e. go over the stuff several times, rather than trying to apply immediately...I just wondered if anyone else was having similar difficulty grasping combos..they appear simple..my error was in believing that by selecting a value in the rows shown in combo that I was actually storing that data...not just the ID...I now know that all I'm storing is the ID....the appearance of the e.g. CompanyName field data in the combo might lend the impression that this is actually stored somewhere...Now, I know that's not so....you cover it in 202 when you demonstrate that the RowSource property is actually "CustomerID" and it's really the ID thats in the field...could be confusing....And arising from another posting, I have updated all my Office to ensure that I'm running the most up to date release of 2000. But still getting the greyed out formatting buttons in Form Design....random...maybe will discover cause sometime.  Many Thanks for your help (and your courses).
Bill