David,

Everything you say is correct except in a buffered form. The distance in time between issuing an APPEND BLANK in an add button and the TableUpdate() that actually saves the record is so far that the difference is imperceptable. To get a blank record for editing you must APPEND BLANK to the buffer, once you have done that it makes no sense to issue an INSERT INTO rather than a TableUpdate().

This is an example of something that was the right way to do things before and has become no longer the right way.