>I have a table that needs to hold up to 5 8-char references. I was thinking of creating a 40 character field, and hold the references in there, but is there a better way of doing this, should I use 5 fields perhaps?

I'd say one field, but 8 characters long and in a different table with up to 5 records, that normalizes the data and lets you go above and beyond 5 records :-)