Help anyone?

I need proceedure or query that parses a name field into first and last,
checking for a single charecter intitial in middle and discarding it.

thanx bunches
james

Look at InStr / Left / Right / Mid / and Len functions in
the VBA/Access help files.  It will take some doing, but
with those tools you should be able to figure it out.

HTH
Tim Hansen

========================

What version of Access?

You can use Instr to find the first space and that should work to get you the
first name.

But, I see problems with names such as
Mary Anne Van Hooten
Robert R. Jones
Robert R Jones (No Period)
James Earl Jones

If your names are consistently entered (good luck there) then you can write a
VBA routine to parse this into parts.  In Access 2K and later you can take
advantage of the Split function to break the name field into parts based on a
space.  Look up Split function in the Visual Basic Help.

  Dim asNameParts(0) as string
  asNameParts = Split([FullName]," ")

Then use the array functions to get the size of the array (Lbound, Ubound), and
examine the various parts to determine First Name; middle initial (if any), Last
Name