>I have been reading the help files for the past 5 days and trying to find
>solutions using any of the 'Trim' functions to produce the results I needed. I
>must be missing something since Larry's suggestion:
>
>Try right(rtrim(lastname),3)
>
>did not appear in the help files I was looking at.

That's because the assumption is that you know Fox uses fixed-length fields -- you can't represent a VarChar with a DBF. If you take the right three characters of a field that isn't completely filled, you will only get spaces. If you use RTRIM() first, you will get a string back that has the spaces trimmed off the right side. Then, RIGHT() will do what you expect.