Hi David,
Your approach looks right and even works for me.
>I don't know in advance that red is the 3rd row, so a can't simply set combo.value to 3. Worse than that the cursor C_Col doesn't exist for some strange reason during the form.init, so I can't do anything there either.
The cursor which is the Rowsource for your ComboBox should be available to you from the Form's Init and moreover also from the Combo's Init().
>What's the best way?
There is probably something else which would be missing in your case. Check out the RowSourceType set to SQL and try using the DisplayValue of the combo to display the content.