>Do you mean the third visible column, or the third absolute column? Either way you could tackle this by adding an array property to your grid and populating it at init with two dimensions: one with column name, and one with column order. After this, whenever you have a column name, you can look up its original order in your array.

He wants absolute, I guess. That's a good idea you have...also, if in vfp6, another idea would be to use ADDPROPERTY to each column in the grid init, and place the start columnorder value in each...