AFAIK, No. You can include 'contacttype' and 'TEXT AS act_notes' in the SELECT field list and run replace afterwards

SELECT ...
REPLACE ALL act_notes WITH ALLTRIM(contacttype) + " - " + act_notes

>
> I understand that a character field cannot be longer the 254, but I need the memo field to stay a memo field, not be converted into a character field. Is that possible in vfp8?
>
>>A character field cannot be longer than 254 charaters. In VFP9 you could use CAST() to make result a memo but not in VFP8.
>>

>>...
>>  PADR(ALLTRIM(contacttype) + " - " + TEXT,254) AS act_notes,
>>...
>>

>>