>By way of solution, perhaps you could show them how to add a field and then write a little program to fill that field with some transformed version of the catalog field that would in fact be indexable. That would teach both how to design the next one and how to fix this one.

Yes, that about sums up my Access goal right now.

First, though, I'm gonna tackle the same situation in Excel, see what I'm up against there. The advantage with this is that I'm much more familiar with Excel, and I might learn something useful for the Access situation, you never know.

There are a lot more Excel users for this, too. I only began with Access 'cause I thought it'd be very easy. Think again, I guess...