Sorry, my brain leaked out of my ears like a runny nose. I should say I've
worked on Excel for one week to be exact and am now "in charge" of 1800 lines
of data.
As Larry says, you're asking in the wrong place. This group is for Microsoft
Access, the database application in Office; Excel is a quite different
program. Are you using Excel, or Access? If Excel, please scroll down the list
of subject areas and find a forum for Excel. The volunteers there will be glad
to help.
I have a master sheet of every person who has appeared in a show for five
seasons. Each season has 12 shows. So my serial number wouldn't have the
same TAV 101 prefix. It will go all the way to TAV 509 (for Season 5 show 9)
The Access answer (if that's what you're using) would be to have THREE fields,
not one: Season; Show; SerialNumber. It's not necessary (or a good idea) to
store the text string TAV since it's (apparently) identical in every record in
the table; just use a format to display it.
You can easily concatenate the three fields for display purposes.
Do you still recommend using a long integer field? There is going to be a
point where I will have to just type the numbers in manually. Reason is I'm
only temperorary and eventually some other clueless monkey will be running
the database. I was looking for a formula to type in and be done with it but
please let me know if this won't work. Thanks for your advice...
Either with Access or Excel, you'll want to use a program (VBA code, a Module
in Access, or a Macro in Excel - same code, different name) to increment the
number. It's not necessary to enter them manually, and it's not a good idea to
use an Access Autonumber (and, as best as I know, there is no such thing as an
autonumber in Excel).