Ancienthighway... thank you so much!  I tried capitalizing it the way you suggested and it worked!  I'm not sure what all the different buttons do... afraid to even try some of them... but I am having fun experimenting.  Thanks again!

Thank you, everyone, for taking the time to reply with possible solutions.  Unfortunately, I already tried most of the suggestions... double-checking my spelling, typing in the cheat while in the neighborhood, holding down shift.  The only thing I hadn't tried was the capital letters as suggested.  I just went into the game and tried that... nothing!  Could I possibly have to do something in the files? 

Don't know why I typed "custom"...  I did correctly type "testing" in the game

I have read about the things you can do with the "boolprop customcheatsenabled true", so I decided to give it a try.  I opened the cheat box, typed it in, and pressed enter. When I play a family it runs perfectly normally, but I can't do any of the stuff the cheat supposedly allows me to do.  I shift click on a Sim... nothing appears but the normal actions.  I shift click on the mailbox, the newspaper... nothing out of the ordinary.  What am I doing wrong... or is there something special I need to upload for this cheat to work?  I am playing with Double Deluxe plus OFB.  Thanks for any help you can offer.