I’d appreciate someone refreshing my memory as to whether the following instances mean exactly the same thing when referring to a form control.

[field1]
=[field1]

If it is to be used in the ControlSouce then use
=[Field1]

hth

You would use [field1] as the control source if [field1] was the name of field in the underlying table/query.

=[field1] works exactly the same in this case.

You would use = as the first character of the control source if you were refering to something that was not a field in the underlying table/query or if you were modifying that field. ex: = [field1] & " Some Text" . (Note: if you modify [field1] you cannot use field1 as the name of your text box else you will get an error.