Yes, yes, and what are the symptoms? - in that order.

Now I suspect the confusion relates to your statement: '.. if strItem is
defined as "TeeSee" in OpenForm ...' What exactly do you mean by that?

If you mean that you have a code line similar to the following in the Open
event

Private Sub Form_Open(Cancel As Integer)
strItem = "TeeSee"
End Sub

then everything should work just fine, although you might want to consider
defining the string as a constant in the declaration section if its value
never changes.

If however you are referring to a DoCmd.OpenForm then short of passing
"TeeSee" as OpenArgs I can't see how you are managing this.

Rod