I am a new access user so bear with me please, I have 10 tables for different areas of a mechanical item,listing spares for each area, each table has the same 7 basic fields, eg item, part number, qty, etc.
How do I retrieve info by field query from all tables ie, by part number or item description (searching all tables), or list all items in one table (area) but by part number or description.
basically I want to call up a spare (by p/n or description) in one area, or all areas and list all the info about that part,
Inputting the info is not a prob, getting it out is. Many thanks

The problem is you have created 10 tables where you should only have one. By adding a new column - Area - , you can store all the data in a single table with the rows relating to one area having one value in the Area column and those of another area having a different value. This structure allows you to use 1 form rather than 10 for data entry and also will solve your reporting and querying problems.