>Is the best way to save a record entail first scattering the current record's data to memvar and editing the memvars or directly editing the live record?

Tim,

You really want to learn to make use of buffering. I use a form that can handle add, edit and deletes. For adding, I set the .ControlSource for each control on the form to "", let the user fill in the values and do an INSERT-SQL with the VALUES coming from the .Value property of each control. If a user selects a record for editing, I fill in the .ControlSource for each control, let the user edit or he/she may click the Delete button to delete the record. Clicking the Save button triggers the call to =TABLEUPDATE() which flushes the buffers and writes the record to disk. The delete button does something similar. The real issue here is that the buffering scheme for each table/view is set in the DataEnvironment of the form. I've never used SCATTER or GATHER since leaving the world of 2.6 and moving on to 3.0/5.0 as the buffer is the "memvar" to which the user is writing to.

Steve