Value List changing itself?

[Dane]

Odd problem.

I have a list of thirty or so teacher names. When filling out report cards, the teachers select their name and are automatically taken to their class lists.

A few times over the past week-- say 4 or 5 times-- the value list has spontaneously changed. Visually it's the same, but when a teacher selects her name, she gets no matching students, even though the student lists show her name in the teacher field.

Further investigation revealed that on the value list the name now has an invisible character padded onto the end of the name, so "Ms. Smith" has now become "Ms. Smith ", and a match doesn't occur. The character is either a tab or something wide, since the cursor when placed at the end of the line is further than a normal character's width from the end of the name (but it's only a single character).

So, has anyone else encounted this? Any idea what could be adding characters to my value list? (It was all different teachers, btw, not the same one over & over). The value list isn't touched by any scripts; it's just a simple name list.

As a work-around, I suppose I could generate a list, possibly using the Trim function to get rid of these characters, but I don't think I should have to....

Thanks--

Dane

[Reed]

If this value list of teacher names is generated from field values, then you might want to ensure that no one can edit the names and change them or add spaces.

A better way to do this rather than using the name field as the match field in your relationship, would be to use a serial number ID field that cannot be edited after the record is created. You can create a value list of the ID values from the teacher records, and format the value list to show the names instead of the corresponding IDs. This way you choose from a list of names, but the ID value actually populates the field and is used in the relationship.