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>>> Also - General Field, were these linked or embedded? And if editing was not done in situ would a Memo (binary) field have worked eqally well?
>>---------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>>The main application has created over 50,000 documents a year for the past 4 years. Linking was not an option because LAN Services didn't want us to put that many file on their network (not to mention it's a bad idea to have so many files in a folder). We tried embedding the document in a General field but this idea was quickly dropped due to redisplay problems (the document stored in the General field is not an exact image of the document we generated) and disk space requirements.
>>
>>We finally decided to store the compressed letters in a memo field. Storing uncompressed documents in a Memo field works as well except it requires about 8 times as much disk space. We compressed the documens because we wanted to use 1 table per year to store the letters.

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You've got me curious - it looks like your Fox application is "generating" the word docs. Do you store the docs for audit purposes (e.g. the underlying data can change) or some other reasons. I've always tried to rely on recreating reports rather than storing them - if the time taken to create is not considerable.
>
>Also, if your Users are editing the fabricated Word Docs - what percentage get edited? If it's a small number [and we are speaking completely hypothetically here, since the app is several years old] would it have been feasible to store only the modified Docs, and regenerate the others as needed from the source data?

Just to let you know, I saved the documents as datatype TEXT in SQL Server 7, it worked fine, until I went to use Word 7 and updated the document through a remote view which somehow corrupted the document. So, I used FILETOSTR, then SQLEXEC to pass the data back to the server. It appears to be working fine now. The real problem here was with merge documents not regular everyday word doc's.

However, thank you for the help.

Regards,

MOnTe