Reverse Lookup Help (beyond Summary Fields)

To help make your question a little more specific, lets say one particular parent record has associated with it three child records. How do you propose to take those three child records, and consolidate the three  field values one parent field? Normally there is some type of summary or folding of the child information when you want to do something like this.

There are two problems you face here.  As Dan asked, one is to determine which record from which child record the data will be taken, the second is that you have to transmit your data (reverse lookup) in a numeric format.

Your text must be in a format that can be converted by formula to a numeric value, then your relationship will summarize your numeric value and your master table will convert your numeric value back to text.

1) Original Text Value

2)  Formula Numeric field converts Text to a numeric value

3)  Summarize in relationship the Numeric Formula field (pre-determine which record to summarize) 

4)  Convert numeric summarized value to a text entry using a Formula Text field

If you want to reverse lookup multi-line text fields you will need another solution.

Alternatively:  Use a Report Link field to display an embedded report (or link) to the child table records with the text data displayed.

Hope this helps.