Hi Chris ----
>
>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...

Consider the following:

nFH=FOPEN("ASCIIFile.DAT")
USE mytable
DO WHILE !FEOF(nFH)
   cLine=FGET(nFH,500)
   SELECT mytable
   REPLACE mytable.field1 WITH SUBSTR(cLine,1,20),;
           mytable.field2 WITH SUBSTR(cLine,21,20)  && Repeat as needed.
ENDDO
USE IN mytable
=FCLOSE(nFH)