Hi Sergey,
I know that in THAT case I do not need macro substitution, but I used that just as an example. In reality, the value in getfield will change to a different field name and the wordhide program will pull the value from the correct field in the table depending on the fieldname that is passed to it. So I need to use macro substitution so I can use one variable name: getfield throughout a procedure and only change the field name ONCE and store it in the variable getfield.

getfield='prof_sc'
value1 = WORDHIDE(&getfield)
?value1

*wordhide function xstr param should = 'prof_sc' in this example only
FUNCTION wordhide
PARAMETERS xstr
set step on
? xstr
IF LOWER(xstr)='prof_sc'
	RETURN 'mdr_dob'
ELSE
	RETURN 'unknown - prof_sc was not passed to this program'
ENDIF

>Tracy,
>
>You don't need macro substitution in this case.

getfield='prof_sc'
>value1 = WORDHIDE(getfield)
>?value1
>

>>I want to dynamically send the value from a field to a function where the fieldname may change depending on different conditions. For instance, if the table is al3dict.dbf and the field value I want to pass is al3dict.prof_sc which contains the character string mdr_dob, I try:
>>
>>

>>*Original Code Works Correctly
>>value1=WORDHIDE('prof_sc')
>>?value1  && returns 'mdr_dob' which is value in prof_sc field in table
>>
>>*New code using macro substitution does not work, why?
>>getfield='prof_sc'
>>value1 = WORDHIDE(&getfield)
>>?value1
>>

>>
>>WORDHIDE should return the string 'mdr_dob' but in fact it doesn't appear that the wordhide program is running at all once I use macro substitution. I placed a 'set step on' in the top of the wordhide program and it never hits it. I have deleted all .bak and .fxp versions of the wordhide program to ensure that it could not be attempting to run an older version.
>>
>>Any ideas?
>>TIA!