lollyjar,
As far as I know, you can't do the same thing in DAO because the fields collection is read only.
You could (I did it once in the old days), just create a recordset based upon a table (whose design you can modify on the fly), then load and maniplulate your data there. It sounds really inefficient, but if your table is not indexed, it will run very fast.
This begs the question, though; Why would you want to do this in DAO? ADO can be used in '97 by adding a reference, and is the default data access object library in 2K and XP. The only gotcha is that if you have references to both libraries, you have to qualify any references to objects whose name occurs in multiple libraries. For example, if you have references to both libraries, and you say:
Dim rs as Recordset
you will not know which type of recordset you're getting, so you need to say:
Dim rs as ADO.Recordset
or
Dim rs as DAO.Recordset
in order to assure you get the right type of recordset.
I'd just use ADO.
Tranman