User Function blocked by OCDB Connection - Is there a workaround?

[Phelony]

Hi guys

I've got a custom function in Access that Annonymises client names for other parts of the company. i.e. John Smith becomes "J*** S****".

Now the code for that works fine. We're trying to pull it through a query into an Excel report which can be refreshed (Access is connected to the live data so it just jumps right through if it's compound select queries).

However, the custom function can't be used to annonymise the data in the framework described above. It gets stuck and investigation has shown that this is by design. (Cheers MS! :banghead: )

I was wondering if anyone has had to handle something similar and knows if it's possible to achieve this without using VBA in Access?

I've been trying to use regular expressions but without much success. :dunno

Long shot, but figured I some bright spark out there might have the answer!

Thanks

Phel