>yes. that's what the manual says too. i'm using vfp 6.0. not sure on the service pack. but after i added the type it appeared to work fine...whatever works right??!! :-)

Not necessarily. It sounds to me like you treated a symptom and not a cause. I don't recall you saying what the value of the variable was when you got the error. That's the first thing to identify when a line of code causes an error. Know the values of your variables.

You can find out the Service Pack the same place as the version. Help | About. If you aren't using service pack 5, you might try d/l it.