thanks. i got it. activerow is working perfectly.
what i was trying to do is to add a new record in case it is the last record in the grid. the grid already filters data for the day's entries, so eof() or recno() = reccount() will not tell me whether this is the last record or not. however, activerow is doing fine. my mistake was that i was running this code on the lostfocus of the right handside cell and not on the valid. that was the reason it returned 0.
thanks very much anyway
jonathan