No, it wasn't even rhetorical. It was an honest question.

Admittedly, I *thought* you were making a mistake, but I certainly did not *know* so.

In PHP, you can do something very very similar to what was going on there (that is, simply embed variables in the middle of strings and have the values of those variables picked up within the string), so I thought it really was possible. If I had had to guess, I would have thought that maybe the apostrophes were the only mistake, and that you could indeed refer to form fields with the [....] notation or similar.

I've used Access *A LOT* as a database from ASP pages (and a bit from ASP.NET pages) and knew it wouldn't work there, but really had no idea how VBA in Access handled Access form fields.

In fact, I'm a bit surprised by the final answer, as I would have expected some integrated way of referring to form fields in VBA. Shows exactly what I didn't/don't know.