Kamel,

Tried that, went back and tried it again nwith differing field lengths and number of decimals. Same result - weird, generally 0.

BTW - IF I export ascii delimited from the Mac, Filemaker Pro screws up the phone numbers on its owm :>(

Thanks again - Miles
>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