I have a table that has a number of records with studentid, their givenname and surname and the extra curricula activity that they took part in. For eg

1 Bill Bloggs Hockey
1 Bill Bloggs Cricket

What I am trying to do is merge the activity field into one so that the record reads

1 Bill Bloggs Hockey, Cricket

Any ideas??
Michelle

It depends on your requirements here. Are you trying to do a permanent consolidation? If so, why this way? Are you trying to do a report, or some other data display only?

This structure should be:

tblStudent
StudentID
LastName
FirstName
etc

tblActivity
ActivityID

tblStudent_Activity
Student_ActivityID
StudentID
ActivityID

Querying this properly normalized structure would allow you to make meaningful reports without duplication of records, as in your current example. This structure would also allow you to create a query to find out haw many students are playing Hockey, for example, without having to worry about where in the string it was entered, and whether it was spelled correctly by whomever made the entry.

If you are serious about doing this concatenation within a table, it may require some coding. Check out this thread to get started: http://p2p.wrox.com/topic.asp?TOPIC_...rms=medication


mmcdonal

Look it up at: http://wrox.books24x7.com

I agree that this information should really not be "combined" into the record of a table. It sounds like you are looking for this in a query or for a report.

In a query for the field you could use:
AllInfo:[tablename].[studentid] & " " & [tablename].[givenname] & " " & [tablename].[surname] & " " & [tablename].[activity]

This will give the fieldname in the query of AllInfo combining the data. and leave the actual data intact in the table.