I still have some questions on this one if you don't mind. As my example, using the visual designer, I created 2 buttons. Q1) I changed the name property on 2 button controls to cmdMassRecaption. However, there is no index property in the property grid. There is an image index and a tab index but no index. Can you clarify this? Q2) By placing cmdMassRecaption in the name field for both buttons, the code generator made the following declarations Private cmdMassReCaption As System.Windows.Forms.Button Private cmdMassReCaption As System.Windows.Forms.Button This would not compile because the second statement produces and error stating that it is already declared. Do I have the naming syntax correct? Q3) I searched my .net Framework documentation and can't find a reference to cmdMassRecaption anywhere. How can I find out more about this button and coding standards in the VB language? I appreciate your help. scout12

I have 39 buttons on a form (numbered 1-39) and I want to randomly assign text values to those buttons when it loads. So I have a sortedlist object with the values I want to assign. However, I want to use a single event (like the form load event) to assign the text string to the buttons. In this load event, I want to use a looping structure like "while" to assign the text from the sortedlist to each button. The only way I could find to do this was to generate the button identifier as a string. For example: string = "button"&counter&".text=x.getbyindex(counter)" x is my sortedlist instance. Counter in this case is the counter on my loop. So as it loops the 1st time, it sets button1.text = the first instance in the sortedlist. The second loop sets button2 and so on. If there is a better way to do this, I am all ears. However, even if there is a better way, I would still like to know if VB has an execute string command. Any help is much appreciated.:) scout12