i asked my friend for a few more details, i was in the process of leaving yesterday when he called and asked me. the data is actually numeric in field 1 and 2. all the data is in SQL server, i think that he is trying the code from access using odbc. if he had the below table he would want to return the rows 3 and 5. saying something like show field 2 <> 0 will not work as there could be older data in there so it has to search on field2 found anywhere in field1.

FIELD1  NAME   STATUS FIELD2
1       STU    LIVE   0
2       MARK   LIVE   0
3       STU    LIVE   1
4       STEVE  LIVE   0
5       MARK   LIVE   2

thanks for all the help.
~M

>>hi all,
>>i have a friend who is trying to do a sql command but is not having any luck. basically he wants to return field1 from table 1 where field2 occurs in field1. i am not great with sub querys but is this easy/possible to do? i suppose it would go something like in pyudocode
>>

>>select table1.field1 from table1 where table1.field2 is found anywhere in table1.field1
>>

>>~M
>
>Can you post some exaple data and desired result? Because the question is not clear (at least for me).
>What value of Field2 must be in field1? ALL or just first or some other?