>It depends most of all on what you feel comfortable with. The only time I use the DE, personally, is when I am working with ADO shape language (which is a bear to code from scratch for me -- my brain locks and freezes and screams at each APPEND).

I work with ADO and because the DE works with ADO OLE DB, I think it's the convenient way of doing data manipulation. Ofcourse, I also tried doing it hardcoded but the big question is, why do it that way? We are already into Visual programming? Is more of a habit issue?

>By the way, I would make dispute your claim that the VFP DE is "far better" than a coded DE. Again, depends on your preferences. I like to code basic VFP data environments (or DE-like functions or objects) and re-use them. Reuse isn't a viable option with the VFP visual tool (all of this, of course, is an aside -- the important thing is, it depends).

Again, Visual programming and it is the most convenient way of accessing data.