>Paul,
>
>Small world. I just finished doing the same thing. What I did is set put both the department id and the department name in the view. The controlsource for the combo is the department name and in the combo valid I set the department id to the appropriate value, this way you see the department name whether the cell is selected or not and when the cell is selected, you can change the department name.
>

That sounds like a reasonable fix. I'll just have to figure out how to document why I've got both a foreign key link and the actual field in the table. I'm sure I won't remember why I did it in 6 months ;-)