Dawa,

Yes, you should be able to read the raw dBase data all day long. VFP can't use their MDX indexes so you are pretty much reduced to using full SCANs or SQL SELECTs to look at the data.

I'd refrain from updating or inserting any new data into the dBase tables from VFP. It would cause index corruption on the dBase side. You may be able to find an ODBC driver that would let you write to the dBase tables.

>Because I'm able to open the dBaseIV tables, what if I use these as templates and populate the records to exchange the data, that way I should be able to maintain the original table/file structure since I am not instructing VFP to change it, right?