I guess this experiment was another way of saying that there is no solution if the length of the number exceeds 12 digits. I broke down and reformatted the table and changed the field to a character field with intervening numerical computations to build the values. Thanks for the info!

>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