"Jason Wills" wrote in
:

but i would like to make sure that people don't
type in anything in the field rather than use the lookup

That is not a job for a ValidationRule, it's a job for Referential
Integrity. Creating a relationship means "this field can only contain a
valid value from that table". As long as that rule is kept it doesn't
matter how the value gets the e.g. combo box, text box, VBA, Excel, MS
Query etc etc etc.

B Wishes


Tim F