Oct 8, 2026 · 24 min · 14 segments
Need one VBA routine to retrieve several related pieces of information, such as a customer's address, city, state, ZIP code, and country? This episode explores a clean Access VBA pattern for doing…
Now, normally when you think of a VBA function, you think of it returning one value.
You pass something in, it does a little bit of work and it gives one thing back.
The user picks a customer and we want to retrieve that customer's address, city, state, and zip code.
Sure, we could write four separate DLOOKUP expressions, right? One for address, one for city, one for state, one for zip.
In fact, if you're just using it here, you could load those short text values directly into the customer's combo box, right? That's what I teach in some of my classes.
You put address, city, state, and zip as hidden columns in the combo box and you drop them right into the order.
You can't do that for long text, but for short text, sure, why not? But if you need the same customer lookup information on multiple forms or from different buttons, or you got lots of long text fields, copying all these D lookups all over the place gets messy really fast.
Now, normally when you think of a VBA function, you think of it returning one value.
You pass something in, it does a little bit of work and it gives one thing back.
The user picks a customer and we want to retrieve that customer's address, city, state, and zip code.
Sure, we could write four separate DLOOKUP expressions, right? One for address, one for city, one for state, one for zip.
In fact, if you're just using it here, you could load those short text values directly into the customer's combo box, right? That's what I teach in some of my classes.
You put address, city, state, and zip as hidden columns in the combo box and you drop them right into the order.
You can't do that for long text, but for short text, sure, why not? But if you need the same customer lookup information on multiple forms or from different buttons, or you got lots of long text fields, copying all these D lookups all over the place gets messy really fast.
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