>I wasn't aware it was for Access you wanted it.

Yes, the index was intended for only a wide audience of Access-only users, otherwise my original messy vfp solution would've been fine, even if not beautiful, but it worked and didn't take long to develop.

However, and most importantly, as Sergey pointed out later, Access will not accept any Expressions for indexing at all. No wonder I spent a lot of time searching in Access, Acess Help, and on the web searching for how to build an Index with expression in Access, and found nothing anywhere.

I'm so accustomed to building index expressions in vfp, I could never even think about using Access now, how frustrating it must be with the index limitation, once you've seen what the Fox can do! I can understand this lack of feature for server-DBs, but Access is made primarily for home users, so it should have this feature, IMO.

>See if Access supports the IsAlpha() function. The expression with IsAlpha(), which somebody else suggested on this thread, replaces a large part of my suggestion: between(... "Z")

I still may try an SQL solution to get the Access ordering, in which case I will deal with IsAlpha one way or another, I have no doubt it can be done directly or indirectly.

Thanks for your help, anyway, Hilmar and others. It was an interesting puzzle to try to solve, at the very least, good brain exercise.