>OH thanks but i meant table name not Table and...i was going to use a cursor so ill change to _tally.(reccount) cant count cursors?
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RECCOUNT() returns the number of records in the actual table. The problem, when using cursors, is that VFP may optimize the SELECT by providing the result as a filtered view of the actual source table. When VFP does this then RECCOUNT() returns the actual number of records in the underlying table and not the number of record that meeting the filter condition while _TALLY always returns the number of record that met your where and having clauses regardless as to whether VFP provided a filtered view as the result. So that depending on _TALLY will always give you what you want while using RECCOUNT() may not give you what you want under certain conditions. The purpose of _TALLY is to tell you how many records the SELECT returned.