wow, many thanks for this long trail, afraid to say I don't understand how that string is being built with the combinations of ' and "
and now to also fully realize that .nomatch=false means a rec was found
I did get a version working when the target rst, (the searched rst) field has no spaces ie "idx" however I was using that for posting examples, my actual search field has a space in the name, eg "idx 123"
so I tried this and seems to be working
rstTargetTable.FindFirst "[idx 123] = '" & rstSourceTable!idx & "'"
so very happy to have this working and again thanks very much but hate it when that happens and I'm not sure why....
any suggestions for links to explain how the ' and " work to build strings and with something like findfirst where to find things like ....you can interchange using []'s or strings to specify field names
Paul (wino moderator)