Brent, the way that I usually do this type of thing is to create an index which contains the fields which can't be duplicated. For example, if I have something like a social security number in the table, I will index that and set it to "unique". That way, if someone tries to enter another person with the same SS#, they'll get an error. You can also combine fields into an index. For example, make an index using the first and last names to make sure the same first and last name doesn't get entered twice. (Not always a good idea since people can have the same name.) But you can combine any fields which you need to be unique into an index and make it unique. The problem is that when the user tries to enter the person again, they'll get a cryptic message that they won't understand, but at least it won't let them enter the person twice. Perhaps Richard knows of a way to customize that error message? I just tell my users that if they see that message it means they're trying to put in a duplicate record.

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Reply from Richard Rost:

I don't know of any way to customize that DUPLICATE VALUE IN INDEX message off-hand. There may be some crazy way to do it with VBA. If this is an issue, you can always perform a quick DLOOKUP to see if the record exists first, and then provide your own custom message before attempting to save the data.