Because you're using LIKE and the wild cards around a space, it's going to find every single record that matches up on any value that contains a space. You could build a dynamic query like what is suggested in Gail's article. In fact, if you want to use LIKE it's probably the only way to do it. If you want to use equals (=) on the other hand, you could do what you're trying to do with the current query, but it changes the behavior of the search.