I need to take an address that consists of "city, state" from column "location" and populate 2 new columns "city" and "state" but leave location the way it is, now I have done this with a SUBSTRING_INDEX command but I have to run the command everytime to do this, how can I make it stick? thanks in advance. also here is my substring code.... SELECT distinct id, first_name, last_name, SUBSTRING_INDEX(location, ' ,', 1) AS City, SUBSTRING_INDEX(location, ' ,', -1) AS State, SUBSTRING_INDEX(seeking, ' ,', 1) AS Seeking_1, SUBSTRING_INDEX(seeking, ' ,', -1) AS Seeking_2, SUBSTRING_INDEX(interests,' ,', 1) AS Interests_1, SUBSTRING_INDEX(interests,' ,', -1) AS Interests_2, SUBSTRING_INDEX(interests,' ,', 1) AS Interests_3 FROM my_contacts