My guess is that a calculated field such as

Company & " - " & CustomerFirst & " - " & City

in each file would satisfy your requirement, assuming that this becomes unique enough. How many guys named "Joe" work as Acme, Inc in Los Angeles?

Dear CaptKurt

Thank you so very much for your help!!It worked beautifully and with alittle bit of "trial and error" I modifed to return more info!!Again THANK YOU!!! If I could be so bold though, I have encountered a new problem regarding a phone number field. We are importing records from an excel spread sheet, that was originally created in lotus (it appears), at any rate I cannot get the phone number cell, when imported to the filemaker field "phone number" to hold the formatting - i.e. (###)###-####, I consistanly get ##########. Have tried numerous formatting changes in excel as well as filemaker. Any ideas/suggestions??

Thank you!!

In almost all cases the formatting is simply a display mask and is not actually part of the data. I would suggest that you either format the data in Filemaker or in Excel via calculations.

Help please!!

Am fairly new to FM (must have an excuse for my ignorance I guess). Have two files (1) Contacts (1) Mailer. Need to "Match" Company Name, Customer First Name and City in both files. When this criteria is established copy the address from Contacts File to Mailer File. Have spent hours in the books and the help area and am totally baffled....any "simple" ideas for a "simple mind"???

Thanking you in advance for any assistance!!!

Use a calculation to change the phone number to a number, then back to text in the format you want. This is what we use for a ###-###-#### format:

Middle(NumToText(Abs(TextToNum(PhoneEnter)*10000000)), 1, 3) & "-" & Middle(NumToText(Abs(TextToNum(PhoneEnter)*10000000)), 4, 3) & "-" & Middle(NumToText(Abs(TextToNum(PhoneEnter)*10000000)), 7, 4)

It won't matter what format the phone number (PhoneEnter) is entered, all alpha characters are ignored.

For the (###) ###-#### format try:

"(" & Middle(NumToText(Abs(TextToNum(PhoneEnter)*10000000)), 1, 3) & ") " & Middle(NumToText(Abs(TextToNum(PhoneEnter)*10000000)), 4, 3) & "-" & Middle(NumToText(Abs(TextToNum(PhoneEnter)*10000000)), 7, 4)