Sergei,

I think that what is happening is exactly as you described it:

"the problem is that '.' (dot) is used for 'object.property' and for 'workarea.field'. It leads to ambiguity which VFP doesn't handle very well in SQL commands."

The TEXT TO cannot be used in our particular scenario because all these expressions are supplied by the user and we do not know in advance whether expression has object reference(s) and and/or references to other columns. However, I agree with you and Naomi that the TEXT TO could be used in other circumstances. The workaround we will use eventually would be using SQL SELECT to create empty columns and then use REPLACE against each column with the expression.

Thank you,
Igor.