I've always wished for a smarter query engine for Jet/ACE. It always seemed to me that If I created a query to sum a customer's open orders and joined that query to the customer table, that the fields from the customer table should be updateable even though the query was joined to a non-updatable query. But, sadly, MS thinks differently and there you have it. As the others have mentioned, if one part of a query is not updateable, then none of the query is updateable.