I have these fields:

Property Name, City, Phone.

I need a field to calculate the first 5 letters of Property Name, City and the last 4 phone. This will give me a unique id for this contact.

Thanks

Easy enough:

left(PropertyName; 5)&City&right(Phone; 4)

But a poor and limiting choice for a unique ID.

Why not a simple serial number?

-Raz

Thanks Raz,

A simple little thing I forgot...

I cannot use a serial number, since it is sorted and the clients use this as a code for all of their reports. Converting to serial numbers would basically put them back several years.

Thanks

Sure thing, but:

There is no reason why the client would ever need to know of the change (keep letting them use the concatenated code for display, searches, and reporting; just adjust the behind the scenes relational structure to something that has a much less chance of producing a duplicate). Plus, you can sort by any field, not just the ID.

I think you will be hard pressed to find people on this forum that think this would make a reliable ID.

Good point. I will implement a serial number that can be accessed as well as the code they want. This willcover all bases. Thanks