Hi Stacy

>Have you tried using...
>
>use table customer
>scatter name ocustomer
>
>This will create an object based on the current record of the table that can be referenced in the OOP world as follows:
>
>to access a field from ocustomer object, use ocustomer.first_name etc...
>

my problem was pretty simple, I thought I'd declared public variables but hadn't(that bit of code wasn't run in the sequence I'd expected)

Having said that, I didn't know about the 'scatter name' trick so that made it worth the correspondence!

Thanks

Harry