The combobox or dropdown listbox has the ability to be bound to one column of a table, and yet display a 2nd column. I want to do something similar in a textbox control. Ex: Application has a table called state which has columns:

id
code && this is the 2 letter st abbreviation
name

I'd like to display the state code, but bind the control to the id field. There are many more instances in this application that I would like to do this sort of thing. I don't want combo boxes, because some of these tables have thousands of records in them. I want to validate the entry in the textbox against the proper table, but not fill a combobox with it. This can be done, of course, if the control source is not a field, but a form variable, for instance, but this gets trickier to keep up with.

Thanks,

Jim.