To answer your question goes back to Foxpro 2.6. I standardly declared and initialize all variables in a program. This program would then call the screen. Any procedures called by the screen are located in the prg. So the blunt of the work was done in the prg. This is the way structure programming was done and to me it simplified things because most of the code is in one spot. The screen procedures handled only simple coding. When I started with Visual, not knowing a whole lot, I keep with this convension. And I like it. If I had to rewrite our application I would probable do it the same way.