i have about a dozen or so tables each of which has the same pair of fields among others. i was thinking there might be an easy way for the data entry person to enter the values for that pair of fields just once in a simple table with two columns and one row and then let ms access turn water into wine so to speak: i.e., use the info from the simple/reference table as the default value for the two fields in every table which has them. effectively, the simpe/reference table with two columns and one row would be being deployed to provide the default values for the two fields of interest.