Thanks Rita, I tried to implement your suggestion.
I haven't been totally succesful yet - maybe I'm just dense.

I'm testing with an event on one of the TIB_grids. I tried both the
KeyDown and the KeyUp varieties. The KeyDown didn't work at all.
The MACRO3[...] is an array of predefined texts. The index is given by the
<letter> in the Ctrl+<letter> combination.
----------------------------------
procedure TfVIS1.ibgrKINOKeyUp(Sender: TObject; var Key: Word; Shift:
TShiftState);
begin
if Shift = [ssCtrl] then
begin
if Key in [Ord('A')..Ord('Z')] then SendKeys(MACRO3[Key]);
Key:=000;
end;
end;
----------------------------------

Then something 'funny' happened: When I ran this in the IDE with a
breakpoint (on the first line in the body) it worked - so it can't be all
wrong. However, running without the breakpoint (or running the exe) gave
no joy (but the dataset goes into Edit mode). This may be a strong hint,
but I don't get it!
One other thing:it seems that any existing text in the cell gets wiped out
- why?

Regards,
Aage J.