>>Thank you again Hilmar. Its good that you also realized that trying to use something like ThisForm.Text1.Value as part of the FIELDS selection in an SQL does not work. However, if used in the WHERE clause. How amazing !!!. I still have a feeling that it should work but may be needs some conversion or enclosure into something. Other Gurus can probably help us on this
>>
>>Fred Kotte
>
>For the field selection, I tried to select the fields both as (ThisForm.Text1.Value), i.e. with parentheses, and combining it in a larger expression, as in 0 + ThisForm.Text1.Value. In both cases Visual FoxPro seems to interpret it, incorrectly, as a table.
>
>On the other hand, I don't see much of a problem using a variable to get user input.

I usually bind the control to a form's property, and when using it in a select I assign it to a variable. I think the main thing here is to have no dots in the expression used inside the SQL statements, so the parser doesn't find anything looking like an alias where there isn't one.

So...

lcValue=thisform.cValue

select ?lcValue as SomeField, ... from ...