Jose, many thanks, your proposal is logical and relatively simple and elegant - I like it! regards Andrew

John, thanks very much, deleting the .clw file and rebuilding the ClassWizard data did the trick. regards Andrew

that's very interesting thank you ... I think you mean pDoc = pLeftView->GetDocument(); I'll try that shortly. Thanks again. Andrew

I am kind of partial to "Inside Visual C++" by Kruglinski. I have found that the best way to learn MFC is by doing. I have never learned much from reproducing book examples. I came from a C, Basic, FORTRAN, assembly language background. I learned the most by taking one of my old programs and making a MFC application out of it. I already knew how the meat of the program worked, so I could just concentrate on the GUI interface. I would use the programming books I bought (I own quite a few) and use the coding examples that applied to the program I was writting. It may not be the best way to learn MFC, but it worked for me. Gary Kirkham A working Program is one that has only unobserved bugs I thought I wanted a career, turns out I just wanted paychecks