>>>There is, AFAIK, no way to programmatically change a field's order in the field list. You have to use the designer.
>
>< snip >
>
>>That's put the fields in alphabetical order. Or are you talking about something else?
>
>There are lots of workarounds, but they all involve creating a new table. Try your technique with a contained table with long field names and/or extended table properties, and you'll see why we really need a native command. Something like:
>
>ALTER TABLE MyTable MOVE COLUMN MyColumn 1
>
>to move a column to the first column in the table. AFAIK, everything else that the table designer does, you can do in code, but not this.

Why do you think I mentioned the (very large) grain of salt?< g > Actually, I'm hard pressed to think of when I've used long field names. Too much work maintaining the existing apps that haven't been ported to VFP yet. Now that I think about it, the only time I use long file names are by accident. Some habits are hard to break.:-)