Is there a better way to prepare an Insert?

Unless I'm missing something, you have to include a question mark for every field in the table (e.g. "INSERT INTO <table_name> VALUES (?, ?, ?, ?, ?)" in order to put the SQL statement into a string in order to prepare it.). I would like to avoid this...the big reason for wanting to avoid this is that, if we add (or drop one) a column to the table, the program with this PREPARE will be broken. (The other, related reason, is that it is a pain to have to make the number of question marks equal to the number of fields.). Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Dan If replying by e-mail, use "danwright AT bigfoot.com" (yes, you replace the " AT ", with "@"...just an attempt to slow the spam.)