>Roxanne,
>
>I think all the converting to/from some other representation may not be worth the effort of a few saved bytes in a memo field. Especially if you aren't using the new SET BLOCKSIZE 0 (which has to be in effect when the table is created) be memo default block of 64 bytes could easily eat all your saved space. I'd just STR() the value it'll make it human readable and very simply decoded later.
>
>>Becuase we're dealing with a vertical table and we need to shove mutiple data types into a memo field.

Well actually we're chewing this whole conversion deal over in order to take advantage of SET BLOCKSIZE 0.