but in the combo box the name comes up many times if it is the first of a group - 'bob jane dave' and 'bob sally' for instance
A combo box can only store ONE value. I assumed that you were using individual names in the combo itself while the field you were searching containing the multiple names.
could you explain a little more about creating the seperate table
Ok, your table structure should probably look something like this:
tPicture
PictureID (auto,pk)
PictureLocation(text)
PictureDate (date/time)
tPerson
PersonID (auto,pk)
PersonFirstName
PersonLastName
tPicturePeople
PicturePeopleID (auto, pk)
PictureID (long)
PersonID (long)
In this situation, tPicturePeople is a junction table that links a person, or many persons, to each picture. And likewise, it functions to link a picture, or many pictures, with one person.
Note that if two people are in pictureID '5' there are two records in the junction table: one for each person.
However, each person has their information stored separately in the tPerson table only once. Likewise, information about each picture is stored only once.
Also, notice how all the information is stored separately: first names go into one field, last names in another....you could also put a field for middle names or suffixes etc too. There's no cramming of several pieces of information into one 'box'. The reason for this is that it's extremely easy to combine data from various fields into one whenever you want, but it's very difficult, sometimes impossible, to split data that has been mashed together inappropriately like in your example: especially if no standard convention was used when mashing things together in the first place.
Essentially, you need to re-organise your data. Read up on table normalization to get a better understanding of how you should structure databases. Also, read up on how to use forms/subforms for data entry to populate the tables easily. You may also want to investigate using the notinlist event of combo boxes to add new people to the tPerson table.
