>Unfortunatly it's already down to one insert into from an array (tried gather too, identical speed), and I tried making the array 2 dimensional so it could do 100 records at a time but it made no difference, it seems that internally it's doing the fpt updates one by one however I pass the update. thanks for the thought though.
>I'm working on replacing the memo fields with numeric fields referencing byte positions in the original data so that should solve it, I'll post back again on how it goes.
>
As you probably cannot send test data, 4 other possible approaches:

1) Read dbf and fpt data into different arrays, gather into dbf but save the fpt array as a whole into the memo. Reccomended 2.x technique<bg>
2) Build 1 memo string easily parsed with alines() into diferent parts again - should be piece of cake to program.
3) Build 1 memo string easily parsed with alines() into diferent parts again - but use a text file
4) Read dbf and fpt data into different arrays but instead of fpt use second dbf

regards

thomas