Concatenate

Preamble:

To concatenate is to join one or more fields together in Microsoft Access.  You may have the occassion to do this on a Microsoft Access form, report or query.

Question:

I have one Table (Customers)

The requirement is Combining Firstname (the first letter), Lastname (the whole part of the lastname) and CustomerID (the whole ID) into 1 Field, Username.

Every time I run the query that i have, Access does not like how i have the update set. I am at a loss here. please help! thank you :)

Answer:
 

Lets first look at this problem.  The questioner has three fields therefore to combine the three fields together then it would look like this:

The examples below are for a Query 

In the first available empty column in the top row join the three fields by entering the following syntax:

Username: FirstName & Lastname & CustomerID

If you want spaces between the names then:

Username: Firstname & " " & Lastname & " " & CustomerID

If you  have spaces in your field name then:

You will need to have [ ] around the field names i.e.

Username: [First Name] & [Last name] &  [Customer ID]

Lets look at the question again:

If we look closer at the question, you will notice the questioner just wants the first letter from the FirstName field and to join this letter with the whole of the LastName and CustomerID fields.  We would therefore need to also use the Left function.

Left Function

The left function, extracts from a field value the number of letters you indicates in the syntax.  For this example, we only want the first letter, i.e. 1.

Therefore the syntax would now look like this:

Username: Left(FirstName, 1) & Lastname & CustomerID

Not what you are looking for, then you may wish to try how to  concatenate fields in a combo box.