>>Dear Yuri
>>Sorry for wasting your time by not being specific in the first place.
>>Here is the exact scenario.
>>The App. runs a select which retrieves a set of fields from my VFP Table. The user exports the result to an excel spreadsheet ( copy to type xl5 ).
>>One of the fields, which is also exported, is a primary key for the table.
>>The user then works on the spreadsheet, mainly editing some fields, doing some calculations, deleting rows ( but not adding new ones ) etc...
>
>And here is the problem: you cannot control what user is doing, how she/he edit fields, what formattings were applied, etc. And after that it is very likely that the very same column in Excel will contain different data types.
>
>In situation like this (when I am getting the manually edited Excel file), I copy the entire sheet into the new file, and with PASTE SPECIAL, VALUES ONLY, and save it in the Excel 2.1 or 3 format. At least after that I know, that the cell format is the same across the particular column. Then I would import/append it to the temporary VFP cursor and work with it to update the master table.
>
>Hope this will help
>
>Good Luck

Yuri
In the previous scenario, i get the error even if i don't touch the excel file, i.e i export it, and try to import it back right away, and already the date fields try to come back as chars...
Jaime