blocking blank spaces on a subform

[Paintballlovr]

I'm trying to block copy and pasted blanks on a subform. Users are copying data from one program and entering it into a subform. Most of the time it works fine and they only capture the wanted characters, but sometimes they're getting blank spaces, which is causing matching issues. I would either like to prevent them from entering blank spaces in the first place or remove them (trim does not seem to clear them out of the table after the data has been recorded to the table). Any ideas?

[ItsMe]

have you looked into the Instr function? There are other functions that can help to parse text within a string such as, Mid, Left, InStrRev

[Paintballlovr]

Under closer inspection, I'm not sure if it is a copy/paste issue after all. I copied the data from my table and dumped it into excel and a funny thing happened, the fields that were reporting a long length dont have blank spaces but instead the data from the field is repeated on a second line. The data is displayed in access like "150086", with a reported length of 13 and in excel it's "150086
150086"
It only happens on some of the entries, so I'm not sure what is causing it/how to prevent it.

[ItsMe]

Different programs use different standards to recognize characters. My preferred method is to get copied data into a text file and then bring it into the DB. This usually strips away extraneous character spacing and carriage returns, etc. Not sure how things are happening for you, but you may try pasting into a text file and then, select all, copy, and then paste into the memo field. See if it makes a difference anyway. Just to wrap your head around what is going on....

[Paintballlovr]

I finally figured out what is going on [asked the users ]. The field in question is at the end of the row, which is one line high. They sometimes hit the enter key trying to get to the next line, but that just does a carriage return within the cell. Now they don't see the number they just typed, so they type it a second time, resulting in the same entry in twice (and sometimes more). A patchwork fix of expanding the field to two lines high will show them that the number is there and they can continue on until I can look into disabling the enter key (they're supposed to be using tab, but I know habits can be hard to break). Thank you everyone for helping out so quickly!

[ItsMe]

You could use a control button the user has to click. The click event could paste into a textbox that is enabled but also locked. You could maybe use acPaste.