Bret,

>That worked, the interesting thing is that .NULL. is returned in child table fields. So I will have to work with that. The other thing I saw was that it was not very fast in relation to a regular not outer join SQL.

You *can* use ISNULL() in the SQL statement if you must force certain fields to a value other than NULL for missing child records. For example with a 6-char field1 in your y table that you want to show "NONE " if null:

SELECT x.field1, ;
       IIF(ISNULL(y.field1), "NONE  ", y.field1) AS detail ; ....

or select to a table and loop thru to change the values, or handle it in the report writer, or ..... (lots of ways for a Fox to skin a cat)