Personally I avoid _TALLY since so many commands & functions in VFP will change it.

I don't think there's any danger of it getting changed if I store the contents of _TALLY to a local variable immediately after running the query, which is what I always do.

I think RECCOUNT() moves the record pointer, which might not be desirable in some circumstances but wouldn't make a difference in my case.

Ken Dibble www.stic-cil.org