Hi George,
You stated it fine. I always open the tables prior to a query or local view via UseTable classes, for the reasons you stated below,...except when I miss one. When that happens, it would be really nice to look at my ErrorLog and know what I left out.

>Personally, I wouldn't vote on this wish as I always open the necessary files prior to issuing the query. I feel that this gives me more information to help resolve the problem if the file cannot be found and so on. My open table routine can log both the fully qualified file name and the alias, rather than just the alias alone. In my mind, this can help me resolve the problem more quickly.
>

Grrrrrr. It's pretty irritating when a programmer says, "I code and test so well, I don't have to worry about missing a table involved in a query." But if you are that good, you should be smart enough to know that most of us aren't that good.