>First reply was about integrity.
>Now about technicals: I am well aware that this approach offends normalization rules, but if you check thread carefully you will see that it started from particular case, and any specific situation requires specific answers. You cannot take some phrase out of context and use as a proof for another area.

Ed,

The issue was John Petersen asking you to provide an example of when you would want a combo that doesn't maintain the rowsource tabel with the correct list of value. Your response was about a lookup table and a "master" table where the lookup table provides a list of available values for a field in the master table. You said that you might want to allow the user to enter a vlaue and save in it the ControlSource table without adding that value to the Lookup table. I said that if you do that then you have violated the relational design of YOUR database. You put the lookup table there. This si not an issue of relational theory, it is simply this;

I make a design that has a table with valid values for a field.
I allow values in the field that are not in the list of valid values.

Now the table that has the list of valid values no longer has a list of ALL of the valid values.