If there is one thing I hate, it's using a calculated field on a grid or calling a function as a controlsource on a grid. Not only does this provide maintainance nightmares, but it is unwieldy and slow.

I've been considering other possibities and would appreciate everyone's opinion on this subject. In general, I think a view will do the trick, but how much of a performance hit will the form take if several of the tables the view is based on has in excess of 100,000 records? What about calculated fields that are based on user values? Would using global variables in the view calculation take care of this?

Should a view always be used to calculate fields? Should a function be used at the grid level? Or is there some better alternative?