Thanks for your reply. I am creating a .dat file that is supposed to
exactly mimic the foxpro table i'm going into. I delete and pack the
table and then append from the .dat sequential file into it. I have
delimited the .dat file with exclamation points. I use a command like this.

use p:\pro60\test50062\artran81.dbf

append from P:\pro60\WADATA\NewData\81ARTRAN.MMDDYYHHMM.DAT TYPE delimited with character !

My first date field ends up blank and then the next field, which is a character field, is overwritten by the next field. Something about the date field
not getting translated correctly causes the append from command to skip to the
next field.

does this make any sense. I'm a newbie to Foxpro with 20+ years of cobol.
This import is for our new SBT (ACCPAC) accounting package. We're loading the databases with our mainframe data.

Thanks.

Doug Bell