WE,

Sorry, I interpreted your earlier reply to mean that you had decided to
use the method that I refer to in my article as "Query".

It would assist those reading your posts if you could give some specific
details.

Here is what I have understood so far...

You have a form bound to a table.
One of the fields in that table is a Business.
This field is represented on the form by a Combobox.
The Row Source of the Combobox is another table, which lists the shops
with other contact information.
The Combobox's Column Count property is such that several of these
fields in the Shop table are included.
The name of the Combobox is [Shop Name].
When you enter a business in the Combobox, you have other controls on
the form where you want some of the shop's contact information to be
displayed.
You are successfully using the 3rd approach shown in the article, which
is referred to as "Column Property", in some of the textboxes.

This is a perfectly valid approach, and is not really "round about".

In response to your question, if you decided to try the "Query" method
instead, the data on the form should still be editable.  As long as the
field in the shops reference table that is the basis of the relationship
to the other table, is the Primary Key field, or otherwise uniquely
indexed.  And, as mentioned in the article, any controls bound to fields
from this shops table should have their Locked property set to Yes - you
want the fields from the main table to be editable, but this is not the
place for editing data from your master list of shops.

Is this making any more sense now?