>Hi Nick, hope you don't mind me returning after so long to this question. I use VB and VBA a tiny bit at work and once I've assigned a variable to an object I can use it pretty much like "Thisform" which I'd expected to be able to do in VFP. The With..EndWith doesn't seem that much of an advantage - or have I missed the point?

Of course you can address them with "thisform....", it's just easier to read the code using WITH...ENDWITH if you assign many properties to the same object.