>Thanks Sergey,
>I did read the VFP help, and found it clear as mud...
>It seemed to say what you say (which made me test adding a field and a variable), but I was hopping I didn't understand. Too bad I was wrong, it makes _pagetotal almost useless for us, I don't see us changing all the reports and going from coding to hardcoding.
>To tell the truth, I still hope someone will come with some clever idea...

The text quoted from the help file seems to indicate that it would be sufficient to use _pagetotal in the report, even if you don't use it directly.

In other words, you don't need to put your entire complicated expression (which might change eventually) into the report designer; it is probable enough to use a dummy report variable, like: DummyPageTotal = _pagetotal

Provided this works at all, you must still touch each individual report, but you will not need to change it, if you later decide to change the expression.