Nadya-

>I doubt, you can do it from the property sheet, if it's what you meant.

I don't know if you noticed my code, but I was using an EVAL on my column's controlsource. That turned out to be the problem. I don't understand why. The EVAL was working correctly as evidence by breaking in the method and examining the value.

By the way, setting the dynamicbackcolor to a function or method in the property sheet is just fine. I'm not sure why you thought it wouldn't be okay. Simply put in the function or method name. In my case it was thisform.getmycolor(smhext.d)