I've almost 'grown up' (professionally) with microsoft's sql standard, thus I'm not too familiar with ANSI standard.
I've played with COALESCE before, but I find ISNULL is sufficient for my requirements; I haven't had to deal with multiple arguments possibly being null and I don't work with large number of rows...
But it is good to know how to 'skin the cat' a different way
Thanks for the input guys