Hi there. I used to work at another company that had FM - when entering a new record and the person you were entering had an existing record with the same name, a dialogue box would pop up and say that a record with that name currently existed and asked if you wanted to add the new record or edit the existing one.

Does anyone know how that is done? Thanks!

Without knowing how your data was entered at your old company, it is hard to say exaclty how they performed the duplicate check. That being said, you can use field validation (unique) if you want to check if a value has already been used.