I discussed it with some of the other designers and I don't think it is necessary to sort the date. The note they enter will be inserted according to the actual date it was entered into the system. So if they need to reference a previous date they will do it in the notes section. Otherwise all additional notes will follow the structure you gave me where it is simply added to the top.

The delete function works great. And so does the Update probably the most problamatic because in my VB infancy I declared the variables in the sub. ie Dim newMemo, oldMemo, edtCriteria as String right at the top of my function. The flow of the edit process requires the button to be pushed twice once to unlock the Memo field and other locked inputs, and the second to save the data and lock the memo and other inputs... So the first time all variables were set... when I clicked the second time of course the variables were all reinitialized and set back to null.

I made the variables global and put a big comment box on them telling people not to mess with them... not that anyone touches Access but me... guess that's why they have interns. I'd say I'm done with this project for good. I still don't understand why it kept crashing when I tried to update the entire Memo at once... but it's been enough headache for one year. I'm calling this solution .. REALLY SOLVED> Thank you to OBP for your support and talk through.