Duplicate Button Fails Me

Dear friends,

At work, we are developing a database in MS Access to manage the data originating from the archaeological site which we are excavating at the moment. The development work is proceeding rather well considering that none of us has a background in database programming. However, sometimes we get stuck on problems that we seem unable to resolve by ourselves.

For example, recently we encountered a situation which baffles us completely.

Background: Last week we develloped the table and form necessary to handle the decorations present on some of the finds. The "decoration table" is linked to the "finds table" with a one-to-many relationship. They are linked by two secondary key fields called "FindID". They are text fields, size 19, with the following input mask set: LL"."LL"."00?00000?-000. This code automatically appears in the appropriate field of the "decoration form" every time we need to relate a decoration to the record in the "finds table".

Problem: At this point we have a record in the "decoration form/table" related to a record in the "finds form/table". However, sometimes we have more than one decoration present on a find. Thus, we place a duplicate button in the former form to add a second decoration if necessary. This should create an exact copy of the first "decoration form" where, then, we just need to change the type of decoration. This does not happen. The duplicate button creates a second copy of the first form, but it does not duplicate correctly the value present in the "FindID" field. For example: instead of duplicate the "findID" RM.PL05 00534A-001 it inserts it in the duplicated form like RM.PL0500534A-001 (without the space between the 5 and the 0). Thus when we query that particular find, it retrieves only one of the two decorations we inserted earlier on.
One last thing: The code looks the same in both decoration forms, but if I do a query, the above difference appears.
Thanks in advance for your help

Perseo