>Thanks Nancy - I did find out this trick by searching for tooltiptext in a thread. But your point about tabbing is well taken. I'm not sure what my users are going to want. I suppose they'll know it when they see it.

A form does have a ShowTips property, which is False by default. If you set it to .T., then tips _will_ show up, but only when you move the mouse over the field. Not when you tab into the field. You could show the tooltip in WAIT NOWAIT window in the control's gotFocus event.
>
>WAIT WINDOW this.tooltiptext NOWAIT
>
>You'll need to clear the wait window when the control loses focus--or you could use a timer to turn it off after a bit, I suppose.
>
>>I want to display a message on entry into each field. I had tried using the
>StatusBarText field but thought the bottom of the screen is to obscure (and not sure I wanted to set the status bar on anyway). I think what would be most useful is Tooltiptext, but when I enter text there nothing shows up. I believe that's because I'm developing in a form and there's no Showtips to turn on/off. Is that correct?
>>
>>I do plan to save the form as a class, but was going to wait until I was 'done' to do it. Is there another way to accomplish the same in forms?
>>
>>Does anybody have any other suggestions on how best to display informative types of messages?
>>
>>Thanks,
>>
>>Sylvia