>Terry workd fantastically well, thankyou.

See - stick with me, kid and you'll wear diamonds :-)
>
>Just out of interest on the article table and fabsum table.
>
>The articles tables is supplied from our software vendor and I am basically bolting on the fabsum table with my own form. Therefore when invoking this program I want to enable buffering on the fabsum table. But I have noticed I dont have to use the tables when using the data environment. Therefore when do I set the buffering mode on and do I have to select fabsum first?

With tables in the DE look at the properties sheet for the DE. On the Data tab, set InialSelectedAlias prop to Fabsum. This is equiv. to selelcting Fabsum on entry/init of form. Select Fabsum in the DE and set its BufferModeOverride property to 3 or 5. Thus you have buffering set. At the form level, set Buffering to 0 (none). I never use this and many old hands don't.
>
>In addition to this am I right in saying that when I click on my save button I have to select fabsum first before tableupdate . The reason i say this is that when I run the form the currently selected table is articles and we cannot update this.

Naturally. If you've selected another table in code or by some other means then you'll have to re-select your target table when you want to commit or reject changes.

Terry