>have you tried it in qoutes? selct a as "t funny char e ` nother funny char"
>That way it would be a literal

yes. It croaks. I can use the e and a with the accent marks and stuff but fox doesn't see the degree symbol as alpha just like !@#$%^&*(). It's not that it's french it's that fox doesn't like anything but strict alpha or numeric values in field names.

Thanks anyway guys. I'll have to massage the field name and then just replace the column header caption.

Thanks again for helping me think this through.