>Bruce
>
>The fields are fixed length so the info for field 1 in my table will always be be the first 20 characters of the text, field 2 will be the next 20 & so on...what I really need to do (I think) is somehow extract the first 20 characters so I can allocate them to field 1, the next 20 so I can allocate them to field 2 & so on...at the moment the system wants to dump everything into the first field in my table...

There should be no problem, I do lot of text loading this way without problems. I would suggest loading the text into MS Word (or similar) and turn on all hidden file marks (LF,EOF,etc.) and make sure the data is clean...