Todd,

I've had to do and and condition a few times on the join, I'm not sure it's standard (or acceptable) to do it that way, but to me it really is part of the joining condition, not a filter (where clause).

>It works like a champ. I didn't realize that I could include secondary where conditions as part of the join statement. So I had moved the tbl1.field_name = 'padmis' down into my where clause.
>
>At any rate, I now get a left outer join, exactly the way I wanted. Thanks again, man!