Hi Paul, I get what you are writing, but I think this is being examined in a cross-purpose way. First, yes, it is possible to use mutate to add the columns at the end of the dataset the same way I had set. But that does not completely invalidate the idea. I think across() was always meant to introduced other possible ways to access the dataset columns. I based this approach on the iris dataset on the across() page for dplyr which showed across() being used a number of ways nested in mutate or summarise without the function direct calls. I played around with your example and these and can see the potential snag. I wanted to keep this in a certain format for this and another post, but instead I will update a version of this post, and plan a version with the function calls (with attribution). I appreciate the commentary.