>Wish it looked that clear. It does seem to have a fixed record length and has what appears to be a header record describing the fields with PAT:LNAME (patient lastname) but there are a load of special characters in the file between fields. Thanks for the input though.

If you can still make out columns, I would also suggest creating a structure to read it into and manipulate it from there. There IS a COBOL ODBC driver, called Relativity, and it is put out by Liant. We use it here to interface between MicroFocus COBOL and Foxpro. But it will require creating a structure within it anyway.