Thanks, Mark your suggestion worked. I issued a select statement before the replace commands and all statements worked like a charm. I did run into a further problem however. This app is running on a Novell LAN. The update to all the records and all the fields would not show up on other peoples screens until the issueing machine exited and answerd YES to a message that data had been updated,should it save. Upon further checking, it appears that when updates are made from one workstation others do not get the changes until the other logs off. What command must I issue to execute these changes that appear to be in a buffer?