Kevin,

>First, for all the 10 million times that the Hacker's Guide has saved me, there's something in the new book (bottom of page 739) that isn't consistent with my findings. It says you can't mix and match WHERE and JOIN...you can only do one or the other. However, I need to do additional filtering on dates and acct/item criterias....I'm mixing both here, and (seem) to get reliable results.

Read again, then read on. Bottom of page 739 is referring to "join conditions" being either JOIN or WHERE syntax. On page 741 the use of the WHERE clause for "filter conditions" is discussed. You *can* (as you have proved to yourself) use those even with the JOIN syntax.

>Also...is it legitimate to have a multi-field concatenation in the OUTER JOIN? (where I have CostRate.Acct + CostRate.Item)

Sure.