AutoFill and Checking the first or first two words.

[hawkins]

The first question I have is I have received a table with the name field only entered for the first row of the information for example:
Addy 115 1-29-10 360
2-29-10 420
3-29-10 230


Airway Heights 115 1-29-10 230
...
The 2-29-10 420 is suppose to be below 1-29-10 and under Addy 115 is supposed to be blank spaces.
I was wondering how I could somehow add Addy 115 to the rest of the rows until the next name (Airway Heights 115) comes up and then enter Airways Heights changes to a new name and do this for the whole table.

The second question I have is each of the names, Addy 115 and Airway Heights 115 have abbreviations, for example Addy 115 is ADD. I was wondering how I could query to check the first 2 or 3 words to match up with the abbreviations in another table and add the abbreviation to a column in the initial table. I have a list with Addy in a column without the 115 and ADD in another column.

The third and final question is that after the abbreviation is created it to be connected with another column. For example, the ADD abbreviation neeeds to be added to 12F1 that is located in another column to get the output as ADD12F1.
Any Suggestions are greatly appreciated

[boblarson]

You got this as an ACCESS table? That can be a MAJOR problem unless there is a specific field that you can sort on to ensure that the records that are showing are actually with the others. You see the problem happens to be that Access does NOT store data in tables in any particular order. If it has a primary key field it will upon compact and repair sort them but it still does not store the data in any order. So records entered in two years ago can end up showing up when you "open" a table after records that were entered two minutes ago.

There is a common misconception that the records are in the table in a first in list basis. That just is not true. While the observed behaviour may be that it looks like it does, in reality it does not. In fact, in the absence of an actual query that has an order by on it for the form's record source, the records in the form can occur in any order and can change between closing and reopening depending on what has happened in the database. Think of the table like a big bucket of fish. If someone reaches down and pulls out a fish from the middle of the bucket, the rest of them can slip and slide around and end up in a different order than they were to begin with.

[hawkins]

ooh ok, that makes a lot of sense. I can actually just drag down in excel I was just wondering if there was an easier solution to entering the blank fields. Thanks for clearing that up! Do you by any chance know how to correlate the names and combine the two columns, questions two and three?