"Tom" wrote in message
...
One more Think Ken

First of all I get so confused in access as to when I use quotations and
when to use exclamation points and in general how to refer to fields that
are
not in the form or table that I am using at the moment. Do you know a good
reference that could explain these for me so I can get a handle on them?

Any good book on ACCESS will give you information about the above items. For
examples:

http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft%C2%A...9282438&sr=8-1

http://www.amazon.com/Building-Micro...9282438&sr=8-2

http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft%C2%A...9282438&sr=8-4


Briefly, you use quotations to delimit text string data. An exclamation
point is used to separate an object from a reference to its default
collection (e.g., Forms!NameOfForm!NameOfControlOnForm = the default
collection of Forms is the Forms collection, of which the "NameOfForm" is
one of those forms; and the default collection of Form (the actual form) is
the Controls collection, of which "NameOfControlOnForm" is one of those
controls.). A dot (".") is used to separate an object from one of its
properties (a value of something) or one of its methods (a function for
doing something); for a Form, all fields from the form's recordset and all
controls from the form's Controls collection are added as properties of the
form, so you can reference them via . instead of !. But this is not a
general statement that applies to all ACCESS objects.