I think Marc answered his own question. The confusion lies with Access. In Access, the wildcard is the asterisk instead of the percent sign. I, too, learned this the hard way (about an hour of frustration) when dealing with Access. Your solution is correct because [I think] the ADO and/or ODBC do the conversion to Access syntax for you.

>I don't do access but give select * from addresses where name like "%DAVID%"
>
>a try.
>
>HTH
>Jeff
>
>>Hi,
>>
>>For some reason my application has to interact with an Access .MDB file. I use ODBC and ADO to interact with this .MDB.
>>
>>I cannot get the following sql statement to return values:
>>
>>select * from addresses where name like "*DAVID*"
>>
>>where Addresses is a table in the MDB and Name is a one of the fields in it.
>>
>>In Access, executing this selection does return records.
>>
>>Is it ADO, ODBC or me?
>>
>>TIA,
>>
>>Marc