Hi Doug,

I just went through a conversion process w/a client who was exporting from Access into Excel. My code read in the data (w/IMPORT command) to temporary tables, massaged it a bit and loaded it into VFP tables.

There was something the client was doing to (sometimes) make date columns look like numbers to VFP, and some numbers looked like date columns.

I ended up coding around it...using formulas based on:
ldBase = DATE( 1899, 12, 30 ) && CTOD("12/30/1899")
liToday = DATE()-ldBase && number of days since 12/30/1899 to TODAY

For values that should be numbers, i used:
CTOD( BADFIELD ) - ldBase

For values that should be dates:
DATE()-(liToday-INT(VAL(BADFIELD)))

HTH, j

>Do you have any idea how to force VFP to import as a number -- to override the date formatting in Excel??
>
>Thanks,
>Doug