By way of clarification - the returns were not in the memo field but rather in the text file generated by the report..... my "brute force" tactic was to modify the report so that I had "~" where i really wanted returns, used fgets to strip out the unwanted ones and strtran to put the "good" ones back!! pretty pathetic or what?? Even wierder was what happened when I wanted to put tabs into the text file using chr(9)..... they were huge in the file generated by the report but looked fine in the preview! I solved that the same way! Oh well, whatever works but it sure was frustrating!