Can I have a field in base that is a combination of two others?

Hello everyone,

First of all allow me to say that I am very new to all this. I just started my company and took the decision to avoid getting involved with Microsoft as I feel uncomfortable and an uncertainty with the costs. So excuse if my question shows a bit of naivety.

We have an ID field in our database of expenses, as well as a year field. So when we put an new entry it takes a new ID (integer) and then a year entry. However we want to have a field which is the document (expense) Ref No. which looks something like Exp1601, where Exp is a string (expense) 01 is the ID and 16 is the year. Is there a way to have a field that is basically a concatenation of these two other fields?

Many thanks in advance for any help and for your time.

The basic setup for entering new records contains controls which are not aware of the contents of each other. Therefore using a standard entry form this is not possible. SQL can concatenate data from fields into another but this then requires an additional step in creating a complete initial record (besides the impracticality).

The other possibility is through coding your own macro to create this field based upon the other entries. However, I do warn that without LO macro coding experience already, the learning curve is steep.

The most practical solution without coding is to either manually enter this (prone to error if ID/Year not same as other fields) or to enter EXP1601 as the actual ID since it seems to be unique.