I have inherited a table with about 5000 records:

In about half of them, the auto-entry serial (number) IDs are formatted “0000001234”.

In the other half, the auto-entry serial (number) IDs are formatted “TE0000005678”. There are no duplicates, the only difference is that some have the “TE” in them.

Question 1: Is there an easy way to strip away the “TE” from the IDs that have “TE” and not bother the others?

Question 2: Is it a best practice to set the auto-entry serial number validation to “unique value”?

TIA

FMA9 on Win XP

Fun with text functions. You're going to do a Replace, here's one possible calc:

If you isolate the "TE" records first:

Replace ( ID ; 1 ; 2 ; "" )

or maybe safer, this will work even with all found:

Substitute( ID ; "TE" ; "" )

Answer 2: Whenever you use unique validation, FileMaker has to scan the index every time you make a new record. With a few thousand records that's not a big deal. But what about 100k records etc? I wouldn't recommend it unless you have a specific reason to use it.

Thank you! "Substitute" worked perfectly.