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I hope this answers most of your questions!!

Bob -

WOW! Thanks so much for taking the time to answer. You provided a lot of information for me to digest. It sounds like you have to account for even more complexities than I had thought of.

I like the idea of a Report.dbf for some of the details, but started realizing I was going to have a big mess in trying to account for all of the WHERE options. I didn't want to create the entire SQL on the fly, so one of the ideas I'm trying today is using an existing form I have for data entry for the main table for which I'd like to allow the user to make choices. I have a query by class whose result is a long string and hope to pass this back to my existing SQL.
One snafu I'm trying to figure out is how to allow for their selection (e.g. WHERE &csomewhereclause or if they don't want to limit, how to replace the where with a wildcard. There is a tantilizing tip in the SQL help which has to do with using a so-called 'ESCAPE operator' for the join condition to use wildcard characters. I thought this might be a way to go, but can't get it to work.

Sylvia