>thanx for the try, Bill, but it gives an error saying 'you must use a logical expression with FILTER'
>any other ideas. with Ko's idea the preview starts loading and then comes up with 'syntax error'
>john

Yeah, funny isn't it. :-) Well I finally got something to work, but I consider it ugly. :-) If the variable holding the filter string is "cSearch", the Name ( not alias ) of the cursor/table in the dataenvironment is "Cursor1", then in the dataenvironment OpenTables event, I placed:

THIS.Cursor1.Filter = cSearch

and this worked. I believe cSearch will have to be at least Private, not Local, in the calling program, but I didn't test this.