I am trying to create a Contact Management database that also contains a purchase history for each record. I used the Contact Management template and I eliminated the "similars" field. I want to keep a running spreadsheet on each customer in a more elegant way than just a text field. Any suggestions?

Well, in windows you can use OLE to have a spreadsheet in a container field, but I don't think that's what you really want.

What you should do is create another table for purchases in the database and one of the fields should be a user_id field that will link each purchase to one contact. You could then place a portal on the contact management layout where you could enter individual purchase info into rows of the portal.