In a typical program, yes I'd probably do that, but this is an oddball. application, and expecially when I'm testing it, I'm adding thousands of records, and then deleting subsets, or deleting them all, so I want it [the pack or zap] automatic in some cases, and under control of debug buttons on the form.

Setting exclusive on the DE, seemed like a nice simple solution. I've never done it before, but now that I have, it annoys me it does not work as expected.

It also has the benefit that when the user is working on this form, it should guarantee no-one else accesses the data, since the purpose of the form is to take a snapshot of data and export it to a .TXT file. Having any updates happen would possibly cause data integrity problems.