Donald,

Then you should look at opening them potentially as a read-only view in VFP. You might also look at the ODBC drivers that ship with VFP and/or dBase or some other 3rd party and go that route. If worse comes to worse I have some old C routines that read dBase tables, they were needed because dBase was so slow doing a particular operation I had to fall back to C to get the job done fast enough. There is also Codebase which should give you access to the live data, you could wrap those C calls in a DLL callable from VFP. My website has an example of how easy it is in VC++ to create a DLL that VFP can use.

>No, they are massive tables and a constantly in use. In fact that is what I tried to do and the process took entirely to long. Because the files are constantly in use you have to copy them to even open them. The conversion requires exclusive use of the tables. I think that I may have to try to figure a work around using dde unless one of you guys can come up with something. I am certainly stumped.