Miles,
Use the STR function passing the second parameter as the length
?STR(phone_num, 15)

>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