Hello All. I am setting up a form that uses the Access default "Find Combo Box" It is searching through my list of customers so that the user can select the customer they want to continue through the order taking process with. I have tested a number of the customers to make sure the combo box is working properly, and have found only one error.

I have a customer called "Three Dollar Cafe - Location." There are 4 or 5 different locations. When I start to type in my combo box, "T - H - R" Normally it would display "THR" with the rest highlighted "EE DOLLAR CAFE - LOCATION". But instead it is displaying "THR" then just adds the rest in "EE DOLLAR CAFE - LOCATION" with no highlighting. so if I were to accidtently go farther and type "T - H - R - E" the combo box would display "threee dollar cafe - location" (an extra 'e' has been added). Secondly, if I only type the "THR" it displays "three dollar cafe - location" but when I hit enter, or click it, it gives me the message "The Text you entered isn't an item in the List" Thirdly, it always shows the first location in the list, so if I wanted the second or third location, I would normally drop down the combo box, and find the next location on the list, however, the combo box is stuck at the top of the entire list. Its very strange and it only does this when I am trying to find a "Three dollar cafe" So essentially it only does it when I type "THR"

Any help would be very much appreciated. If my DB is necessary to help, let me know, I'll copy and paste it into a new DB that isn't as big and doesn't have private info. Thanks so much in advance.

Have you tried making each occurrence of Three Dollar Cafe - Location different in some way? Perhaps with city location or street name?

I think you are getting this behavior because the occurrences are not different and Access doesn't know how to handle this.

You don't say, but you might also try binding the combo box to the Primary Key of the table (you may already be doing this).

The locations are the city in which they are located, and none are the same. Thanks. I'm not sure if they are bound to the PK. How do you go about that? Thanks

You would need TWO fields in your combo box. One is the Primary Key, the other will be the name of the restaurant.

Use the Combo Box Wizard to build it. Select the Table, then the Primary Key and Restaurant Name fields. Hide the key column--the user doesn't need to see it.

When finished, open the form in design view. Get the properties of the combo box you just built. On the All tab, verify that the Bound Column is column 1. The Column Widths property should be something like 0;1. The first width will be 0 indicating HIDE this column.

Ok, I added the PK field to the combo box, and the problem still wasn't solved. I found that for some reason when I typed the THR it was bringing up the first three dollar cafe field, only it was adding the accent to the e in cafe. Thats why it wasn't working properly. I took the word cafe out of the names, and it all works fine now. Do you know why access is automatically adding the accent when I type in the combo box? if that isn't fixable, its ok for me to just take the cafe out of the name, I think, but I'd like to work around it if at all possible. Thanks for all your help.

EDIT: I actually just went in and the search is causing the problem for any account name I have with the word cafe in it. Any Ideas????

Edited by: g2gsr on Wed Jun 1 9:51:15 EDT 2005.

Was the data imported from another source? Could the accent have been present then?

Yes it was exported from quickbooks to an excel worksheet, and then pulled from there to the access db. I checked all three locations though and no accent was present in the other applications.