>When you setup a view in the designer and give it a parameter to use in the criteria, how do you get ALL records? For example, I have a view with a parameter ?lcCategory which the majority of the time is set to one of many possible categories in the database. However, sometimes the user wants to see ALL categories (hence all records). I can't just make it blank, because it looks for a blank category, but none exist (categories are chosen from a lookup table). At first I thought this should be easy, and it probably is, but I'm not getting it!!! Any help would be appreciated.

If the parameter is character (i guess it's the case by name convention) then you may keep SET ANSI OFF (it's default) and set lcCategory='' (SPACE(0)). This case SELECT-SQL (view) will pick-up all records.