Creating Equipment ID's Automatically From Departmental Info

Hello,

I am starting to get further into access development, originally i started from a sample database and have been teaching myself as i go along. This database has come pretty far and the farther it comes along the more my company demands of me from it!

either way, it is basically a database that holds all of our asset information, equipment parts, workorders and preventative maintenance. We've been plugging along just fine but I want to help their productivity and have access automatically create "Equipment ID"'s from information that is entered by the person adding an asset. I would like it to create an ID from Entry of the Department, Location, and then a 4 digit Autonumber after that.

Basically we have a few basic departments, IT, Facilities, etc. and a few locations... So we have been setting our equipment ID's like this:

AA - Two characters for the Location
BB - Two characters for the department
0000 - numbered field

So I really would like to be able to create these automatically instead of manually typing them in to a text field with an input mask.

AABB-0000 to automatically create entries from the departmental info, location info and then automatically create a 4 digit number in order to follow it.

What is the best way to do this? Keep in mind I am just barely able to do any code, I only have been going from what i see in the database and building upon it and learning a few bits and pieces of code from there. So if you start going into a code explaination go slow~!

Thanks,
Jim