Kamal,

Yes tried that first -- that reduced the phone numbers to the results of the strange arithmetic. Also tried copy to with delimited and sdf. Same thing.

I'm thinking I may have to strip off the header and work on each record as a series of strings, grabbing the bytes one by one on a positional basis.

Miles

>Miles,
>
>Did you try opening up the tables exclusively and setting the field type to Char with the right length?
>
>>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