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So I can see from trying it that you do mean literally what’s in the quotes. When I run the query it asks for T2.Publication and T2.PubDate. So I chose a publication I know where there’s an overlap and made up a fictitious date. It returned the match but then it returned a fake match, telling me that another piece also matched the T2.Publication I put in. Both matches used the fictitious date. Close but not there. It shouldn’t ask me for any information. It should just check for matches of sub1-4 in table 1 against piece in table 2 and return them or if no matches return nothing.

When you say “…” as Sub3 do you mean literally quotation mark 3 periods with no spaces quotation mark? Forgive me if that’s a really stupid question.

I appreciate the responses so far but none are quite working.

Let me clarify because Pat’s point about table design is well taken, and Charlotte, your suggestion didn’t seem to work. I got a long list with the one item that matched, rather than just 1 match. I don’t want all the records to come back, I only want the matches to come back to the query. That’s why I thought an inner join might be the approach.

Table 1

Sub1
Sub2
Sub3
Sub4

Table 2

Piece
Publication
Date

Sample Record Table 1

The Horse Goes to the Moon
The Rock and the Hard Place
The Dog Catcher
The Sneak

Sampe Record Table 2

The Sneak
The Orange Review
04/04/02

I want the query to see if any of the fields in Table 1 — Sub1, Sub2, Sub3, Sub4 — match the Piece field in Table 2. If there is a match, I’d want the query to come back with the match only, something like:

Sub 1——-Sub2——Sub3————– Sub4——-Piece————–Publication—————Date
—————————-The Sneak———————The Sneak——-The Orange Review—-04/04/02

(The dashes are there because this forum won’t show spacing in my little chart.) If there are no matches, the query would return nothing — and thus I’d no there was no overlap in what I was proposing to submit and what I have currently submitted. Table 1 may have 100 records in it and Table 2 may have 100 records. It would be a lot to check manually/visually to see if there’s a match.

Does this make it any clearer what I’m trying to do?