I have three tables: one for individual animals, and one each for GPS & VHF
locations for each animal from it's radio collar. Each animal may have from 0
to 100,000s of locates.

I want to update the 'LastSeen' field in Individuals with the date of the
last time it was located. I have a method that is working (with help from
posts from this forum!) for the smaller VHF table. However, when I try the
same method on the MUCH bigger GPS table, it's painfully slow (I haven't had
the patience to let it run longer than 20 minutes, and it's still on the
first tick on the progress bar)! Is there a better way than this:

"qryVHFdateAscending" =

SELECT T1.Individual_ID, T1.Date
FROM VHFLocations AS T1
WHERE (((T1.Date) In (SELECT Max(Date) FROM VHFLocations WHERE Individual_ID
= T1.Individual_ID)))
ORDER BY T1.Individual_ID;

and

"qryLastSeenVHFUpdate" =

UPDATE Individual INNER JOIN qryVHFdateAscending ON Individual.Individual_ID
= qryVHFdateAscending.Individual_ID SET Individual.LastSeen =
qryVHFdateAscending.Date
WHERE (((qryVHFdateAscending.Date)[Individual].[LastSeen]));

(the last criteria there is to make sure I only update if the new value is
in fact after the existing value)

I tried it using a 'totals' query such as:
SELECT VHFLocations.Individual_ID, Max(VHFLocations.Date) AS MaxOfDate
FROM VHFLocations
GROUP BY VHFLocations.Individual_ID;

which is very fast, but then the second (update) query gives the error
message: "operation must use an updateable query". Is there a way to use the
results of a totals query to feed an update query??

Thanks in advance,
Jey