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Derek BrownFlag for United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

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ID or description

If a combobox has two columns, a description ID, and a description (Text) and it's value is used for a condition in a query grid, is it acceptable to use the description rather than the description ID.

The reason I ask is that If someone creates a description and a description ID and we use the ID I would then have to make it impossible for the user to change the description associated with the Description ID. I have found IDs to be more reliable than Text values in queries so not sure which is best.
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unknown_routine
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You can make combobox read-only, So user cannot change description ID.

Using both ID and description ID are Equal. Both can be bind to a Grid column depending how the respective column in the Grid is defined.

If per your application logic user should be able to change the description in the combobox then using ID's could be better as per business logic 2 duplicate descriptions may be allowed,
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IrogSinta
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Adding:
Assuming combo Box: cbo1, then you may use cbo1.Column(0) for ID, and cbo1,Column(1) for description.

Using cbo1 without column property refers to the bound column.

It is customary to use the description in a scenario like this: Assuming description is "abc"

Where ID equals the id of the record whose Description = "abc"
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Thank you all.  Access 2002

The problem would not be with using a read only combo but the form that creates the combo's values. I force the user to create combo values in a form and then select them from the combo this stops users typing "Plot1" one moment and  "Plot 1" the next into a record,

I have has a situation where filtering on text caused the following problem:
Data was copied from a spreadsheet and pasted into an access table. But the data from the spreadsheet had text with trailing blank spaces. So if I selected "Bill" from the combobox the filter did not find "Bill  " with trailing empty spaces. This is extremely frustrating because the user can see "Bill  " in the table but not in the query results.

Should I run a routine to clear all spaces from all tables or is there a fix for this problem
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Thanks Scott

I would be very interested in how the data is validated. How would you clean up trailing spaces? and how do you check things like capitalization, that sounds like a nightmare to me? Is there an existing function for capitalization?
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There is no existing function to check capitalization. Often you use Regular Expressions for things like this, although if you have firm rules, you can sometimes just use VBA.
Thank you all. As concise as usual