> Alls well an good but I have no control over the incoming file. It > contains 406 fields and works fine in dBase IV and Clipper. I, however, > need to extract 203 of those fields and compare them to the present days > work to see if there were any changes. Is there a way to take just the 203 > fields that I need without opening the table?????????? I have tried > looking at APPEND FROM, SQL_SELECT, and others but all of those appear to > want the table open. I would suggest 1 of two things, depending on which you're more comfortable with: 1) ODBC drivers, specifically something that can read dBase 4 files and > 255 fields 2) LLFF, and programmatically interpreting the structure. If you want help with the second option, then please send me 20K - 100K bytes from the top of the file that you need to read.