Michelle,
Yes, I use the AS to give them more meaningful names. The view designer can create that view but it's hard to maintain with the way it does it. So I just do it by hand. It's pretty simple because it's read-only just providing FK translations into "human readable" data.
SQL can get real hairy, real fast but it's pretty amazing what it can do at times.
>So you can just name the same table in two joins? That's cool. I never was very good at SQL. I guess it's time I learned. :)