I have a database that stores suppliers and their contracts(one to many) I want to set up a form where the main form will give me their personal details which I'm ok with. In the subfrm I want the cost of their contracts to appear. I know how to get this working.

However I'm not sure about the following:

In this search I want to select supplier then select contract type ie hardware/software/other. I understand I will need to give the option of selecting from more than one combo box but how should I go about setting this up. At the moment I have a field called "Description of software" which has at least 5 different pieces of software under each supplier so rather than make each piece of software a field I decided to make this data type memo and make it like a list. If I decided to add more fields like this for desc of hardware would I therefore need to use 2 subforms for hardware/software?

I am just really confused about the set up as I have only ever dealt with one search at a time and I know how this works but perhaps I just need some general tips on format of multiple searches

ny tips greatly appreciated

Why isn't software description in its own table?
Primary Key, SoftwareSupplierID (foreign key), Name, Description, Price, etc...

Trying to uncombine the descriptions from a memo field for each software supplier is going to be problematic at best. You can even have the same piece of software coming from different companies at different prices, but this will require a different structure.

You are correct that each piece of software should not have its own field, however you might want to do a bit more reading up on 2nd and 3rd level database normalization.

This is an article off of the Microsoft Support website, but there are others out there. http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q100139

HTH,
David R