I am trying to print Shelf Labels for a college bookstore. From an
Excel spreadsheet, I import data into two FM tables:

- Course (containing course info)
- Books (containing book info including ISBN, author, title and the
Course it's being used in.

Most courses have more than one book (17 books in one course is the max
but 98% have 8 or less). The same book can be used in more than one
course.

Each shelf label contains all the books being used by a specific
Course, Section and Instructor via a many to many relationship based on
Course_ID. It works well until I update (reimport) changes.

After the intial spreadsheet is imported, data ralated to both the
Course and Book tables can change. Instructtors can change, books can
be added or dropped, etc. I want to print ONLY the labels that contain
information that has changed since the first printing.

In theory, I could do this by concatenating all the important data from
each shelf label and storing it in a third table when it's printed. For
example, a single field in a third table could store a long string of
data that concatenated Course_Name&Section&Instructor&ISBN1&ISBN2,
etc.) Course_Name, Section and Instructor would come from the Course
table and ISBN's numbers from the portal showing related data from the
Books table.This would paint a unique "snapshot" of the label at one
point in time.

When I imported records, I would run a similar calculation and compare
the two fields using the EXACT function. Those that weren't exactly
alike would be flagged for printing.

Works in "theory" but I haven't been able to figure out how to combine
the data in the Course table and the portal containing the ISBN numbers
in the Book table into one field.

I've tried the ValueListItems function with confusing results. The only
way I can get it to display any data is if I set the behavior to a Drop
Down List and I have not been able to figure how to get that data
combined with the data from the Course table into a single field for
comparison purposes.

Any help would be appreciated.

Scott C