AFAIK, there's no way to retrieve the field names for an Access table using
SQL.

I have created a query which looks at a single table with some fields that
look up a person's family name by personal ID number and associates those
individuals with a file.  I want to take the name fields and concatonate them
into one for reporting; however, I get something strange even though the
concatenated field and the family name fields refer to the same relations in
the lookup table.

The query return will return 5 fields that look something like

File #   Smith   Jones   George   2, 3, 1

where the 1,2,3  are personal ID numbers autonumbered  in the personal
information file where they are looked up.  Why can't I get Smith, Jones,
George returned in the last column?

Access 2000
XP Professional

I've just come upon a godsend of an object (ResultSetMetaData) and written a
function to use it, although it's in java:

    // **************************************************************
    // Return the names of the columns of the given result set in a
    // hashtable
    // **************************************************************
    private static Hashtable GetTableColumnNames(ResultSet rs)
    {
        Hashtable ht = null;
        int intColumnIndex = 0;
        int intNumberOfColumns = 0;
        ResultSetMetaData rsmd;
        String strColumnName = null;
        String strTable = null;

        ht = new Hashtable();

        try
        {
            // Get the metadata
            rsmd = rs.getMetaData();
            intNumberOfColumns = rsmd.getColumnCount();
           
            strTable = rsmd.getTableName(2);
               
            // For each column...
            for (intColumnIndex = 1; intColumnIndex <= intNumberOfColumns;
intColumnIndex++)
            {
                // Get the column name and put it in the hashtable
                strColumnName = rsmd.getColumnName(intColumnIndex);
                ht.put("Column" + intColumnIndex, strColumnName);
            }

            // Put the number of columns in the hashtable
            ht.put("intCount", Integer.toString(intColumnIndex - 1));
        }
        catch (SQLException e)
        {
            System.out.println("GetTableColumnNames SQLException Error: " +
e.getMessage());
        }
        catch(Exception e)
        {
            System.out.println("GetTableColumnNames Exception Error: " +
e.getMessage());
        }

        return ht;