>Ed,
>
>I responded to your first post and have just read the subsequent posts. I appologise for my post if it made you feel your contribution was not valuable. The dialogue has been very usefull to me, Thank you!
>

No big deal here. It was more an issue of the need to distinguish the use of the column and the cost of the distinction that brought me into the discussion in the first place. The idea was that the original idea, to use the Outlook-styled approach to indicating the sort column and sort order, wasn't going to be done with the native VFP grid class or a simple derivative of it, and that the cost of a kludge to make it appear that exact way was excessive in terms of initial development and eventual maintenance.

There are plenty of alternatives - the most Outlook-like would be to buy an ActiveX control with the desired visual behavior that was compatible with VFP; it would probably be cheaper than trying to roll your own, but it couldn't be programmed in the same way that a class based on the VFP native grid class could, and might pose problems further along, especially if this was one of many grids used, and would be the only one with this visual behavior.

The next most Outlook-like approach, from my POV anyway, would be to select a font for the header that included the up and down triangle symbols; you could buy the font, and all that would be given up would be the disabled, semi-3D appearance of the indicator. If you constructed this font using a font editor, or bought one based on the same base font family as you used in your other grid headers, the change could be handled with a simple subclass of the base grid class, or even during instantiation of the grid before it became visible on screen.

Everything else from there became an issue of how far you could stray from exact emulation of the Outlook style of presentation of the data grid header. Once it was agreed that you could stray, it became an issue of what would be acceptable to the user. If no degree of variance from the Outlook presentation style were acceptable, then all the little quick tips and in-house standards used by other people didn't amount to spit; there was no cheap way of getting that behavior from the commonly available subsclasses of the VFP grid class, and noone knew of a commercial product you could add to VFP to get the behavior and appearance desired.

So we digressed, from the original question, to no, there isn't an easy way to do this with the native class but maybe you could fix it by kludge, to maybe you can buy something that acts the way you want and program it to behave like a VFP grid, to close emulation of Outlook's visual appearance using the base grid and a different font, to less close emulation that gave the same kind of indication but looked less Outlook-like, on down to something completely off the original topic and having very little value to the person who first asked the question...like this message.

So why have the extended conversation - the person who asked the question the first time stopped listening 25 messages back!