When I began programming with FoxBase it was standard practice to refer to fields as tablename->fieldname and to just refer to variables as varname. When FoxPro came out the mdot notation for vars became standard and I think I missed a basic shift in philosophy. In any case, I still prefer to reference fields by table and that is what led to this problem. Jim, you are right that such a basic thing should be given more prominence in the help files. My coworkers cannot believe that the little test code gives the result that it does. They come from VB,C,and Delphi backgrounds where fields are almost never accessed directly. To them this VFP behavior is really really weird.