Well, this client has less than 5k, so that's a bit more managable. I'm trying to visualize how that would work... Every place you need a picklist, you have a bunch of controls where they have to enter critera until they get it down to less than 10 possibilities? Doesn't that slow data entry down quite a bit? And how do you find room for all that? I can barely fit a picklist on some of these forms.

This is all really new to me. I've been working with Accpac (SBT) Pro Series and the original version of this app for most of my programming career. The whole N-tier idea just kinda boggles my mind. And it's really overkill for this app, anyway. I'm just trying to do it a little because I want to keep the Pro Series data seperate from the custom app data so they aren't so tied to keeping the accounting system.

Anyway, getting me to understand n-tier is waaaay beyond the scope of this thread, so I'll let it go here. I need to get back to this app.

Thanks again for your help,

Michelle

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>You are right, there is no way a user can remember all items in a pick-list. But i have installations where the company has over than 400k customers... Should i try to fit 400k customers in a pick list... I use pick lists for very small set of data ( 5-10 records ) greater than that, it becomes useless. So what's the solution: search. Asking for criterias from the users and presenting them with a narrowed down list of 10-20 items. They can then pick and repeat...
>
>Stephane

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>>I've read that, but honestly, I don't get how you can do that. When the user clicks on the customer picklist button, they expect to see all of the customers, not just some of them. I have no idea what customer they're going to choose, so how can I possibly guess at a subset? And if I knew which one they wanted, there wouldn't be much point of a picklist. I guess I must be missing something. Or don't anyone else's users need to choose from a list? I know mine don't memorize every record in every lookup table. LOL!