Did you install the northwind sample? If not, do so. Look at that, you can see how a lot of stuff works.

Yes, we finally got Northwind installed, but I hadn't gotten around to looking at it. I plan to, hopefully soon. This was just something that happened to come up that I thought I could try and play with Access and accomplish the project at the same time. :)

From what you said about things like average books read per month, you don't need the day of the month. Suggestions about using a number are good. If you don't want to parse the year and month out of a single number, use 2 numeric fields for month and year. To extract the stuff you already put into the date field and populate these 2 new ones, add the fields in design view, make an update query that uses the month() and year() functions.

I really don't do an average of books per month, if I ever count it's per year, but the data base was only to be able to pull up a given title and the date read, so it wouldn't need all that extra field stuff, as long as I could sort it chronologically.

As I stated in another post, my husband helped me find out how to customize the field. :)

I can't recommend an access book, I haven't bought one since access 2.0 (which was far and away the best version, after they purchased foxpro for its index technology and before too much fluff and cruft were added). Go to the bookstore of your choice and browse. At this level, it probably doesn't matter what book you look at.

I have some awesome Access books, but unfortunately, I didn't know what to be looking under. Custom doesn't bring it up, data-field only brought up Excel, etc. I'm sure somewhere in one of the books, it's in there, but not without extensive searching. It would have been nice though for it to be listed under data-types, which is where I would have thought it would be, but it wasn't. The only book I didn't look in, (and probably should have), is my Complete Idiot's Guide to Access. ;) But I figured this was a more complex task and might not be covered in there.

I'm only trying to learn Access better so that I can say with confidence on a job interview, that I know the basics of how to use it.

Thanks!

Nightowl >8#