Hello,

I'm wondering if it is possible to have an auto serial number that covers two fields on two tables. I'm building a database to track the inventory in our lab. My database is has two tables with information of materials: Raw Chemicals and Biological Supplies.

I have an "Auto-enter Serial, Can't modify auto" on the chemicals table and I was wondering if I can extend that to my biological supplies table. By this I hope to have a unique identifier for every object in the inventory.

If anyone has any ideas it would give my tired brain a rest.

thanks

js22

You can try having the auto serial for the chemical table to be Chem1, Chem2, Chem3,... ChemN and the other to be Bio1, Bio2, Bio3, ... BioN.

But I am wondering if you shouldn't combine those two tables together and instead have a field that identifies what category it belongs to. There could be a table for categories (Raw Chemicals, Biological Supplies, Physics toys, etc. ) and then the material table with the new field that either stores the category name or category ID.

John,

Your way makes a lot more sense then the way I have it set up. I think I'll merge the two tables and have a category drop down list. This way I won't need to worry about duplicate serial numbers.

thanks

js22