>My first reaction was "Duh!", then "Huh?". Why didn't this give me an error?

It's FoxPro that should be enough to explain why it doesn't work the way you expect. *LOL*

>It makes me wonder if the dynamicforecolor is actually getting set to anything. I filled in the parens, and it still doesn't work.

I refuse to write complex code in a little cell on the property sheet. The only time I've used Dynamic*Color in an app my grid column has DynamicBackColor set to thisform.StageColor(recno("stackstages"))

The method code then just returns the appropriate rgb() value like this:

* this method provides the colored cells for the grdStages
* they match the colors of the pages from the stack ticket

lparameter pnRecno

do case
   case ( pnRecno = 1 )            && Yard
      return rgb( 255, 255, 255 )
   case ( pnRecno = 2 )            && Pre Dryer
      return rgb( 255, 255, 0 )
   case ( pnRecno = 3 )            && Kiln
      return rgb( 255, 128, 255 )
   case ( pnRecno = 4 )            && Cooling Shed
      return rgb( 255, 128, 0 )
   case ( pnRecno = 5 )            && Plant
      return rgb( 255, 255, 164 )
   otherwise
      return rgb( 192, 192, 192 )
endcase