>I used REPLACE command to demonstrate that the spaces are still intact after the switch. As Dan suggests, if you need to change char to varchar after the fact, the better way is to create new structure and re-load the table.
>
>REPLACE command in T-SQL is the same as STRTRAN in VFP.

Ah ok, I see. But, moving 26 million records into a new table just to get rid of the spacing issue might end up to take longer than simply replacing the actual spacing values with an empty string. IAC, on that particular table, the field does not exist yet. And, it will be VarChar(100).