Kendall - I want to "refine" what I was saying earlier, and confirm that your approach is indeed appropriate in some circumstances.

After some careful thought and some experimentation, I've realized that the principle is to have only a single *updateable* table represented in a view. The "user friendly" stuff is, indeed, sometimes unavoidable, or at least preferable to the alternatives. This information would of course be in non-updateable columns of the cursor.

Where I suspected (and have confirmed) that this kind of info makes life easier is when you're doing a gridless one-to-many form. You may want to present a list of the child records in a listbox, and use the listbox for navigation between the child records. In this case, you want to take advantage of the listbox's behavior of moving the record pointer in a cursor being used as the RowSource for the listbox. The information in the listbox must often include "user friendly" translations of values in the underlying table, and pulling this info in via joins is the way to go.

OTOH, I can't see much to be gained in updating two or more tables via a single view, and in fact think this is going to lead (sooner or later) to more trouble than it's worth.