Hmmm...there are a lot of ways that you can do this. It depends on how
many possibilities you have for that first letter.
If there are lots of possibilities OR if you expect the list to grow,
you could create a table that holds the list of your 'specific
information' and a letter ID that corresponds to the 1st letter in your
InventoryNumber field. I am assuming that each letter corresponds to a
unique value for the desired information, such as A = Apples, B =
Bananas, etc. and that you don't also have A = Apricots. If that's a
valid assumption, create a table with two fields in it: AlphaID
(primary key, 1 character long) and Description (text). Enter in all
your items into the table. Since this would be a table with a maximum
of 26 entries, you could then use a
DLookup("Description","tblDescriptions","AlphaID = '" &
Left(InventoryNumber,1) & "'" in a form or a query to grab the
description that belongs to the 1st letter of your InventoryNumber.
If there are only a few possibilities AND you DON'T expect the list to
be changing, you can create a custom function using the Select Case
statement in VB. It would be something like this:
Public Function GetDescription(InventoryNumber As String) As String
Select Case Left(InventoryNumber, 1)
Case "A"
GetDescription = "Apples"
Case "B"
GetDescription = "Bananas"
Case "C"
GetDescription = "Cantaloupe"
Case Else
GetDescription = "Invalid Letter in Inventory Number"
End Select
End Function
You could then use that function anywhere you'd like to get a
description.
HTH,
Jana