The exception to your statement is if you have to sort or display the column in numeric order. If the column is character then you have to deal with padding the left of the column with spaces or zeros to make it order correctly. I would rather use a number column and convert it to a character for display if an order is involved.


>When deciding if a field must be numeric or character, I ask myself this question: Is this field will be used in a calculation? If the response is no, it will be a character field, otherwise, it will be numeric.
>
>>Changing the structure now from Numeric to Character means digging into code to see all areas that have been impacted - which is wuaht I may have to do ultimately. Actually, this field has no calculations at all - keeps me wondering why the previous person declared that field as a numeric one.