You are right, a numeric field would be preferable in that situation. I was just mentionning an alternative.

>But why go to all that trouble when all you need is to display a character. Also, in a select statement you have to order by val(charField). I do most of my work with a SQL database and the rules are differrent there. Just seems a lot easier to have a number and not have to worry about all the rest. Last, there is the size of the column. A char(10) is bigger then an integer.