>Foxpro still has to substitute the macro stuff and when it does, it gets a command that is too long.
Yes sure. But the limit is 8K per command line. Generally it's not the command line that exceeds but contained expression. ie: & substitution is sometimes done wrong and instead of a memofieldname you might be directly referring to memo contents which could easily exceed the limit. If this is the case by dividing the whole command line you could find it more easily. W/o macrosubstitution does this command run correctly from command window (and length below 8K limit) ? And dividing also might provide a way to keep it in limits. ie: for fields list you could remove alias for fields that only exist in one table. But in all you're right syntactically they're the same. Good luck.
Cetin