Excellent suggestion, John! Thanks for the change in perspective.

One more question. I need to change sorting order on the fly to patient name, SSN, or medical record number. Would a parameterized view, with the sorting order as the parameter, be the best choice for my grid source in this case?

>Hi Criss --
>
>Setting a ControlSource to a function is not a good idea; I can well imagine that the behavior would be hard to manage.
>
>Why not try the following: Create a cursor or view with the decrypted information and use that as the source of the grid. I guess what I am saying is, overall, decouple your encryption/decryption stuff; tie it into saving and retrieving data and get it out of the UI.