>greetings
>
>without selecting MyAlias....
>
>1) REPLACE MyAlias.MyField WITH "My Value"
>
>
>2a) lcMyAlias = "MyAlias.MyField"
>2b) REPLACE &lcMyAlias. WITH "My Value"
>
>
>The first one works.
>
>The second one (2a, 2b), I'm using macro-substitution, comes back with an error "No table is open in current work area." Why?
>
>TIA

The two forms must be performs in the same way
(the second asks for the intervention of the compiler parser and therefore it is slower)

Check your code, sometime the active workarea is empty.

if not used()
   messagebox("empty")
ENDIF
REPLACE ...

If a command allows it, it is better to use the expression interpreter,
then this is better:

REPLACE (m.lcMyAlias) ...

If the active workarea's record don't exists, VFP ignores the replace
( I guess that this is done for support reverse relation replacement)
without error.