I tried "Help" and looked in books, but couldn't find how to make a field of a form (and/or table) default to show the current day of the week (for example, "Thursday"). I'm not sure what field type it should be (date or text), and I tried "=Weekday(=DATE))", and variations, but none of them worked.

Dont whether this will work in Access 97 but it does in Access XP. At least you can try it. Open the form in Design View. Right click the date field. Click properties and the format Tab. In the format field enter dddd. This will give you the day in full. ddd will give you an abreviated day, Mon, Tues, Wed etc. dd with give you the date with leading zeroes and d by itself will give you the date withoutleading zeros. The format you are using =Weekday(=date) is more remincent of Excell than Access. Stuart

Stuart, thanks. It doesn't seem to work in 97. You only get "long form and short form, etc. not weekedays. However, as a rather non-elegant work-around, I seem to be able to get the desired end result as follows: In the data tab I can make the default to today's date with =DATE(), and in the format tab choose the "long form", which is "Tuesday, Novermber 11, 2003", and simply make the box on the form small so that only "Tue" is visible.

Are you not able to overtype in your own format overiding the default ones? Seems such a basic thing it should be possible. Stuart