>What I'm hoping I can come up with is something like
>
>Select codedesc as Name, memofield as Alias
> from codetable c
>where c.coddtype = "somegroup"
>
>and have 'Alias' be a character field, not a memo field
>

In VFP 9, use the CAST() function:

SELECT codedesc AS Name, CAST(memofield AS C(100)) AS Alias ...

Tamar