Jim,
Okay, I can see that situation. Maybe you could have solved it with a join, and retained the long field names.
create cursor blanks ;
(myint i, mchar c(20))
select * from customers into cursor cursor1
select * from cursor1 ;
left join blanks on (.t.) ;
into cursor cursor1 readwrite
>
>I had the situation a couple of weeks ago where an external process was passing me a cursor. I needed to add some fields to the cursor before having the thing used by a Word Mailmerge. So I ALTER TABLEd and got what I need but only after finding out the hard way that the long field names needed changing to 10 chars or less to mke it work.
>
Steve Gibson