excellent suggestion. thank you.
these are all very good suggestions, thank you very much indeed. the reason the texts cycle every thirty two days is that I collect data on specific countries, and there are thirty two countries in my set and I spend one day on each country at a time. but occasionally I get to do two countries in a day because there is nothing to collect from the first. the texts are just the adjective-form of the country name plus some fixed text. and, my supervisor puts a flag on the country table to indicate which country is due today. so I could just use her flag to indicate the country and concatenate the texts in a query. one query for each text, an extra for a blank option, then bang them in a union query and use that to power the combo-box. then I can do away with the extra table I created and this will all make me look very clever when it was you guys doing the clever stuff all along.
cheers guys.
Cottonshirt