Andrew,

The order of the fields in the header is the order of the columns in the part of the file that contains the data rows.

>I am tinkering with tables opened with fopen() and I'm also looking at them with a hex editor. I have observed that for any field numbered n:
>
> OFFSETn = (FIELD LENGTH n -1 + FIELD LENGTH n - 2 + ... + FIELD LENGTH 1) + 1
>
>i.e. the sum of all previous field lengths + 1.
>
>Q: Is this always true, or is it possible for a field's offset value to be independent of the order of its description in the table header?