>One section of the data contains the date in the following format YYYDDD where YYY is the year (097) and DDD is the day number of the current year (245). I'm quite familiar with VFP's date functions and have converted form a number of formats in the past, but this one has me stumped. Unless I have completely missed it, I don't know of a "day of year" function in VFP.

What about about 245 + the first day of the year which will give you the current date for 245th day.