Steve,

It's going to be hard to tell you what is now wrong without seeing your table structure, the append command you are using and a representative sample of lines of the csv.

Sometimes you need to append the csv into another intermediate cursor that has an alternate structure that is more compatible with the csv and then use a SQL or other DML instructions to massage the data into the correct type. For example use a c(20) field in the intermediate and then pull it apart into arguments to date() or datetime() to get your final data type.

>OK, now I am having excel write the csv file, then foxpro appends this to
>premade table: oe2005, but some unsual things are still happening. For instance,
>in a field called mYear that could be stuffed with a number like
> val(dtos(ctot(date and time info)))
>or with a string like
> dtos(ctot(date and time info))
>or with a real datetime and in a T, datetime field
>
>(Then I do a browse and see that the mYear field is nicely full of data.)
>
>But, when I do this command, the field mYear unexpectedly turns up blank,
>and in every case.
>
>SELECT * from oe2005 INTO TABLE oe2 ORDER BY mYear
>
>This is also something I have never seen before.