Cut and paste data entry into form

[bcooler]

I have a form that I created to be a "maintenance" form that allows upper level users to add/delete/modify recalls and the associated serial numbers. I was successful making the form tell me what serial numbers are associated with an existing recall. However, due to a large number of serial numbers for a given recall, I don't want to force the user to type all of the serial numbers on new recalls. I'd like to allow the user to cut and paste serial numbers into the form (from Excel maybe) and have this add to the form/supporting table. I think this would be easy with the current setup except for one problem:

The serial number is not the primary key, but the forms record source requires it. I'm imagining I need some type of lookup to take other pasted info (maybe a combo of the part number, serial number, etc) and reverse lookup the primary key so it can be placed into the form/underlying table.

Any thoughts? I thought some type of Dlookup or query would help, but I'm not sure. THANKS!!!

 

[randy700]

You might want to link to the Excel spreadsheet and create an import query that moves the data into your table.

Randy

 

[bcooler]

The problem I have is the recall record must be stored with the serial number's primary key (which is an autonumber generated by the table and is also a number that no one uses except the database). The reason is that the serial number is not unique.

How do I get Access to cross reference the serial number entered by the user with its primary key? To put it another way, if the serial number was what I was trying to store, I'd just cut and paste into the existing form. However, this won't work since I don't want to store the serial number, only it's cross referenced primary key.