Dear Zack:

One purpose of a "totals" query is to combine multiple rows into one, and to
have columns across these subsets of rows that are "aggregated" with
functions like SUM, COUNT, MAX, and MIN.

Those columns not aggregated are GROUPed.  This means that every combination
of values in those columns that are grouped will form a subset of the rows
within which the aggregated columns are evaluated.

Sounds like a bunch of hyper-technical gunk, right?

OK, make it simple.

You have a soil sample for a field.  So you see:

Field    Most Recent Sample Date
1            5/19/2005
2            6/03/2005

Now, you add a column, say, who took the sample, by initials.  Now, if there
have been 3 samples last year taken by 3 different people, what do you want
to see in the column for the person?  Likely you want to see the one who
took the sample that was most recent.  Is this right?  Is this the kind of
result you want of all 7 of those additional fields you mention?

This will take a different query altogether.  Rather than just finding what
that date is, we must use that date to find a whole row of data from which
to return those 7 columns.

If this is a correct assessment, please do this.  Open the query in design
view and switch to SQL View.  Post the text of the query back here.  I'll
work from that to get you the kind of thing you want.

Make sure you send the malfunctioning version of the query that shows the 7
additional fields you want.

Tom Ellison