Fred....

>>There is no difference between a value of 123 and 000123 if the field is numeric. It's all in the "presentation" of that value.

Understood... thus my second response to Tyler. But Tyler does have a slight problem if he wishes to "present" the leading zero data. Not in the actual presentation...as that is a matter of the format code I mentioned in my first response...rather it is a matter of how to "save" the number of zeros.

I guess there are a couple of ways (off the top of my feeble head) to do this.... have an extra numeric field that holds the number of zeros and write that info to the file and use that info plus the original field in the presentation. Or convert the field to a string and save in that format. I'm sure that others can think of better ways.