>This is one of the biggest hurdles in converting our FPD2.6 app to VFP... The programmer used a 16 digit numeric field for the account number and when I open the accounts table in VFP, every account ending with 9 is rounded up !!!

Rick's idea sounds good, if you have to go that way. I'm not sure why anyone would need a numeric field of that size & precision, the gross sum of all the world's GNPs is only trillions. That's - let's see - at the quadrillion level in magnitude. Maybe in certain scientific work, I don't know :) Anyway, that's maybe why vfp didn't worry about it, just efficiency in the size & storage of numeric fields.

Making it a char string seems logical. You don't actually have to do calculations with it, I assume? To convert, you can split it into 2.6 strings and re-combine later...