Steve,
That is not true. First record being null or not doesn't affect the resulting size. It's known by VFP using the fieldsize of bvalue.
Cetin

>Tracy,
>
>Does the first record in the query result have a match between table1 and table2 for that field? Are you allowing enough spaces in the space() function? If you use NVL(bvalue,"") and the first record has no match, then the field won't be wide enough to show any results.
>
>>Something strange is happening with this very simple query. The result cursor has no value in the bvalue field for any of the records. However, if I enter a value and save, it is there later. Something is wrong with the query. When I look at table2 (there may be some records table1 that do NOT exist in table2) most of the records have a value in the bvalue field, but some do not. However, when I do the query, the result table has no data in bvalue in any of the records...
>>