I think I tried sparse both on .t. and .f., and it did not seems to fix the problem. However, I toggled so many things, I need to re-check... but I don't think the fix is THAT simple. Besides, I specifically need sparse set to .f. for this case.

In this case, to column is either displaying a part description directly from the job_items.desc field if the job_items.part_no field is empty and if job_items.part_no is not empty, the textbox must show the matching desciption from parts.desc. So the dynamciccurrentcontrol property for this column contains this:

iif(len(alltrim(job_items.part_no))=0, 'text1', 'text2')

and the controlsources are:

text1: job_items.desc
text2: parts.desc



>I ran into a similar thing, but with derived textbox control... The one thing I DID change was the SPARSE property. Apparently that will force the color updating since you are swapping between dynamic controls/colors.
>
>HTH