Bill,

I didn't think of textmerge for this kind of situation -- I've mostly used it in web page construction from templates.

He could SELECT just the fields needed to a cursor, then do the textmerge. This does need a little work if outputting non-character fields -- it choked for me with a logical field. And why PADL and not PADR?

I'll put this one in my "neat ideas" file.

>I don't know about brighter, but how about:
>
>

>IF USED("a_table")
>  USE IN a_table
>ENDIF
>USE anytable ALIAS a_table IN 0
>
>y = AFIELDS(la_fields)
>
>SELECT a_table
>SET TEXTMERGE TO export.txt
>SET TEXTMERGE ON NOSHOW
>SCAN
>  FOR x = 1 TO y
>    \\ <<PADL(EVAL(la_fields[x,1]),la_fields[x,3])>>
>    IF x # y
>      \\ <<CHR(9)>>
>    ENDIF
>  ENDFOR
>  \
>ENDSCAN
>SET TEXTMERGE OFF
>SET TEXTMERGE TO
>
>USE IN a_table
>