>I am importing data from an Excel spreadsheet. One of the Excel columns has values similar to the following: 1015617. I want to import that as a character string. For some reason, VFP converts this to a date (08/29/468). Obviously this is causing problems with the import. I can correct this by setting the default format for that column in Excel...however, I don't want to have to do this each time I import a new version of the spreadsheet. Is there a way to force VFP to recognize this value as a string not a date?
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>Thanks,
>Doug

Doug,
How to reproduce it ? If Excel didn't format it as date or importing to an existing table as date then it's imported as normal. Otherwise 1015617 corresponds to 29 Aug,4680 (Excel keeps dates as numeric values starting from 12/30/1899).
Cetin