What is the problem with indexing the memo field? You could do it like:

index on padr(memofield, 100) tag ....

Otherwise you may add a character field to the table and replace its value with teh value from memofield.

>I need to change an existing memo field to a character field because the client now needs to be able to sort on that value. The size is not a problem because the longest value is about 75 characters. When I change the datatype all values in the memo field get lost. What is the best way to handle this (VFP5)?
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>Thanks.