i use FM for my patients archive. i use two tables one for patients and one for the referring physicians. in the patients table i have pt's name and physician's name fields. what i want is that when i enter the physician name in the patient's table to be automatically entered in the the physician's name field in the physician table, so that i do not have to duplicate the work.

Patients have only one referring physician, right? But physicians can refer multiple patients. So, you need to view the referred patients in a portal from the physicians table or you need a third, join, table called referrals.

You might want to do it the other way around: enter the physician first, and on the patient layout, make the physician a drop down value list based on the field in the physician table.

This should really be done using physician ID rather than name to link the two tables. Your value list would then be based on the ID but also display values from the name field.