are you able to do something with the auto number.

i'd like it to display R/N "month" auto number "year".

i cant seem to get it to display the month and year

When you say you want it to display R/N "month" auto number "year"., what do you mean by 'it'?

If you want a text field on a form to display that, then you can use ][tablename]![name of the autonumber column][/ to get the autonumber value and format the date to get the month and year.

what i mean is that normally when you enter a new record, the unique id creates a new number.

what i want is the auto number to display the record number, primary key, what ever you call it but i want it formated that it displays in the box the auto number with R/N at the beginning, which i have done, but i also want it to display the month like 01 02 03 04 for jan feb mar apr. is this possible?

As far as displaying the number with RN before it is concerned, you can do this easily in VBA (just construct a string made up of "RN" & autonumber.

With the date part, I don't know of a way to do it, other than storing the date the record gets created in a separate field (again, easy to do using VBA).

Maybe one of the more expert bods out there in the forum has another way of doing it?

You should not use an autonumber for this. There is no way to guarantee that autonumbers are contiguous (gap free) only that they are unique. You should create a incrementing number using DMax(). This has been covered often enough before.

You can construct your compound number using a calculation. I assume you hold the relevant date in a field called [MyDate] and the sequential number as [SeqNo].

="R/N"&DatePart("m",[MyDate])&[SeqNo]&DatePart("yyyy",[MyDate])

I would use an unconnected autonumber as the actual Primary Key.

thank you very much for the information. i was wondering if you could break that down for me a bit more.

im not very experienced with MS Access, so some of this has gone straight over my head.