I am looking for a phrase based on if a field (NAME) has 4 characters or more. If the field starts with 4 characters or more. I want to take everything up to the first space or the end of the field, whichever comes first, and put that into another field called (SECNAME).

Bob

First NEVER use NAME as a field name it's a reserved word!

To filter out the NAMEs with 4 characters use Like "[a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z][a-zA-z]*" in the criteria of a query. That will give you all the records with 4+ characters in NAME.

To obtain SECNAME use IIf(InStr([NAME]," ")>0,Left([NAME],InStr([NAME]," ")-1),[NAME]) in the same query in a Field. If you run the query you will have a list of all your SECNAMEs. You can then use this query to update your new SECNAME field.

Copy and paste this into a new query in SQL View (change Table4 to your table name).

SELECT IIf(InStr([NAME]," ")>0,Left([NAME],InStr([NAME]," ")-1),[NAME]) AS newSECNAME
FROM Table4
WHERE (((Table4.NAME) Like "[a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z][a-zA-z]*"));

HTH.

Malc.

Name - Reserved Thanks

Does the [] exclude any value that is in between the brackets?

What does []* "*" do to the value?

Thanks for the help.

Bob

[] includes the range of characters inside the brackets, that is a to z AND A to Z. You can use a ! to exclude characters, that is Like "[!a-d]*" would filter OUT records with a to d as first character.

The * is a wildcard that indicates selection of zero or more characters.

Please read the Help section on "Using Wildcard Characters in String Comparisons".

Malc.