>Have you tried saving the Excel98 to Excel5 before the import , see what >effect that has?
Bingo! That did it. Thanks, Bruce. Only thing that annoys me about it is that I didn't think of it first.

>It usually seems to mean there's some kind of Excel formatting that the vfp >internal import code can't understand...is there something in a field at the >22nd record that's a different "datatype" in Excel that might cause vfp >interpretation trouble?
It very well could be, but it isn't anything obvious. The only reason I chose 22 records is because that was how many were visible on the screen at a time, not because of anything that data would dictate.
I was going to try MSDE instead of Excel - as a matter of fact, have sent for the CD from Microsoft - and try my hand at running queries against it. Just browsing the manual on that I realise this is not for the faint of heart.