Sorry, MS Access and 'those fripperies' is where I come from. It is regretable that SSMS's query creator isn't as polished as Access's. I have absolutely no idea why anyone would WANT to create a table through text and not a GUI. It's like coding HTML in notepad or anything in VI. You can do it, but why? Especially when you can use the GUI to generate a script which you can then tweak. Generally, for VBA recordset SQL, I'll use the query editor to build and test the SQL, and copy-and-paste the SQL into code for tweaking. Why would I want all my fat-fingered typos in my code when I have the tools to avoid them--and be way faster to boot?