>What you do, Kendall, is create a separate view to display the user-friendly stuff - but the view is readOnly - the SendUpdates is .F. The system we're working on right now has well over a hundred views. (there are only about 60 tables in the system). We'll often have 3 or 4 views in a form, but only one is updateable. The others are used to populate list boxes, combos, grids or other devices to present to the user. Anything they can edit is bound to the updateable view.

Sorry for my intrusion, but this thread is getting very interesting.
Although I admit that your point of view is good, I think that it doesn't solve at least one example. Let's assume that I need a grid to show all the main fields + the friendly stuff related to the foreign keys. The Join clause is just what I need for this purpose. Then, assume that I need to use a form to modify all the fields of the selected record in the grid. I already have the view, so, should I keep the grid's view read-only and use another view for the form ? No, in my opinion.
Doing so I should requery the same dataset twice, the first time for the read-only view with the friendly values and the second time for the updateable view with only the updateable fields. What I prefer, instead, is to use the same view for both the grid and the form, making the grid read-only. Obviously, there's a performance loss when compared to a 'naked' main view, but sometimes it's really useful to show the friendly values in a grid display...

It's ok when you talk about read-only views to populate listboxes and comboboxes or whatever else to allow the user to make a choice for the updated value to insert in a field, but I think that the Join clause can be very useful, too.