>That is, apart from the fact that it uses a character field, which is easy enough to change.

My $.02....

Character fields were used in TasTrade because of a bug in VFP3.0. If a numeric field is used, and then used as the bound column of a combobox, VFP can confuse the row number of the combobox for the bound value. (Becoming a menace to your data. <g>)