>Good thought! The table I created had 51 fields and the .dat file had 50 fields. There aren't any field names in the .dat file, just the data separated with the '|' symbol. I removed the extra field and checked the field sizes and thay appear to be large enough. It's still not bringing in all the fields though. Is there a way to bring in the fields one by one without it adding double, triple and more rows with blanks? It would be really hard to have to create 50 separated tables and do a REPLACE ALL table.field with table2.field.
>Thank you!

OK, it really boils down to: Do you have each record on it's own line, or is this .DAT file just somebody else's propriety database format? If it's somebody elses format, you'll possibly have to do a lot more work than an APPEND FROM can do for you. You might have to use Low-Level file functions to read the data and parse the field values out yourself.

Or get Data Junction (which I believe was already mentioned).