Well, Vlad, I definitely read such a rule for ORDER BY. And I did qualify, and strongly as I saw it, the supposition regarding TOP. I must admit, though, that I didn't see that rule for TOP, meaning I must read more carefully in futurew.

Cheers,

Jim N

>>Later, I saw there was an *. Not having seen it while responding, it simply made sense to me that, especially for a UNION, where *all* SELECTS must result in identical field content with identical formats, that this would be a requirement. If you know differently, why not say so instead of just typing "WHY"??
>
>Well, there's no such requirement. Fortunately! :) But you were so sure about it, that I had to ask why. :)
>
>Vlad