First of all I'm suffering from a monumental hay-fever attack so thanks.
Assuming you ment "whole word or just abbreviation", you can certainly set up a find dialog box that does your search. However, an abbreviation would take some special processing beyond simple VB functions. If you want to go with 'StartWith', you can deal with that intrinsically.
In a nutshell, let's assume that your users will click into the control they want to search, then click the 'find' button you provide.
You will want to create a form in which they can enter the find criteria. You can learn the find criteria by checking out the parameters to the DoCmd.FindRecord function.
First, record the control that had Focus before pressing the OK button:
' declared in a module
Dim PrevCtrl as control
Function GetPrevCtrl() as control
set GetPrevCtrl = PrevCtrl
end function
sub SetPrevCtrl()
set prevctrl = Screen.PreviousControl
end sub
------------------
Then, in the command button click routine, save the previous control, and open the search form
SetPrevCtrl
open the search form
docmd.openform "TheSearchForm"
-----------------
In the search form's OK button's event procedure
GetPrevCtrl.SetFocus
docmd.findrecord <params from search form>
HTH