I understand but i went down this path by using a com object to preformat my columns and rows to solve this and its like you say some columns may be formatted a certain way but there cells are not one thing i have thought about is formatting each cell individualy but this would tremendously slow down my import proccess so i have steered away from it. The other thing with this is even if i try to clean this up in foxpro after i have imported it because of the problems with these data types a lot of times my data once it is into fox is so trashed its beyond any cleanup i could do with code. Good way to see what i am talking about is to take a fox cursor with dates and change there datatypes to character then to a copy to with a type excel and in excell they will appear as dates but they really are character so when you import you have issues speccialy if a user edited one or some of the cells then fox has a hard time deciding what data type to give the collumn and trashes the rest of the columns or trashes just that column.