The basics

[malc-c]

And that's what's called "RTFM"

LOL - well I'm try. I know that to get help here it helps if one can be seen to be doing the basics, such as RTFM... even though I may not fully comprehend it

As you said - "bit 3 needs to have a value of 1110"
A bit is a "Binary digIT". It can't have a value of 1110. Just like you can't count over 5 on one hand....If you take another good look at that datasheet, you'll see that the ADCON register (and I think you really want the ADCON1 register) has 8 bits, like most other registers.

So its the lower half of a byte - having 8 bits

Therefore...it follows, according to the PBP manual and it's explanation of the usage of the "%" character, you can set bits in any register or variable from most significant bit to least significant bit, left to right.
Hence
ADCON1 = %00001110

So it follows that we can set values for ADCON, CMCON etc much the same way as we can set which pins are inputs and outputs on each port eg PORTB=%00000000

If that answers your question, great.
If it's entirely too much 'duh' information, sorry, didn't mean to insult your intelligence.

yes it does help and I appreciate the effort to post in such detail

Is that the ticket?

(EDIT: Re-reading your post above, I see that is in fact what you really wanted to do...Hopefully this clears it up for you)

Yup - that helps a lot. Like I said its been a while since I programmed these things and as I get older I seem not to be able to retain things as easily as I used to
Thanks