Bill,

>Are you SURE <g> that the Full_Name that VFP evaluated first was short? I'll bet you were just 'lucky' PadR() takes 'luck' into your hands! <g>

Well, I didn't exhaustively test it, but I tried with a table containing two records:

Firstname(20) Lastname(30)
David Stevenson
William von Williams

Without PADR, just using TRIM(lastname)+", "+TRIM(firstname) AS fullname, I got complete entries in a field 52 chars wide.

I then reversed the order of the records, so William came first in the table, and got the same result.