William,

Try this experiment:

CREATE CURSOR Dummy (nDummy N, n10Dummy N(10), n12Dummy N(12), n14Dummy N(14))
APPEND BLANK
REPLACE nDummy WITH 19990512019, n10Dummy WITH 19990512019, ;
n12Dummy WITH 19990512019, n14Dummy WITH 19990512019
*!* Ignore the overflow, data was lost message

BROWSE
COPY TO C:\Dummy TYPE CSV

*!* Open C:\Dummy with WordPad


>I have a reference number being stored as a numerical type which is comprised of a date and sequence number such as " 19990512019". When I select this number in a view for purposes of writing it to a comma delimited file, it converts to scientific notation such as "1.999E+10". I try to convert it to a STRING value before including it but it remains in scientific form. Unfortunately, a lot of code would have to be written to convert the native field to string. How do I "shut off" scientific notation and get the value to operate as a strict number field??
>
>TIA