thanx for your responses, referential integrity unfortunately didn't work
for me, the list was already populated with other stuff, so i couldn't force
the integrity, but i understand that if i had designed it like this to start
with then i wouldn't have had the problem now.

fortunately the other post worked great, (setting the LimitToList property
to true)..

thanx both of you

regards

Jason
"Jason Wills" wrote in message
...
I would like to create a validation rule on a lookup field in a table.....

the lookup table works fine, but i would like to make sure that people
don't
type in anything in the field rather than use the lookup.... as this would
add a new record in the table with a name that i dont have control over

Any ideas would be great...

Cheers

Jason