I've taken a customer database off an old Clarisworks system running on an ancient Mac. Clarisworks exports (slowly) to a .dbf file. When I open the .dbf, the phone numbers, which are typically 00 41 75 4114 are now in a numeric field as 00 41 75 4114.000.

Doing str( phone_num ) results in strange arithmetic on the numbers, values of 0, 41, 436e12 are among some of the values which have been returned.

Does anyone have any ideas on how to preserve these numbers - e.g. "cast" them to char type?

TIA - Miles Thompson