<quote>then that is not a SQL question, you'll need to format that in whatever language you're using to display or save the results.</quote>said by other user "question but it seems you want blank rows instead of repeating values. In this case, you just want a list of depts with associated employees, but you don't the dept listed over and over. SQL does not easily support this. You could use domain aggregate functions to count the occurrences of specific value in a field, and when it exceeds 1, display null, but that is quite contrived. You could also use 'group by' subqueries with count() to see if you should populate the field or not. Again - quite contrived and a lot of work." "As a side note, your employee number is open to RI issues. If you change an employees dept, the number would also have to be change. I think that would violate 3rd normal form. Better would be to let the database create an autogenerated number for each employee, and then concatenate that to the dept number as a calculated field." best, any query using reference 1 please post me