Michel,

I've always felt that using DTOS was to ASSURE true date order (regardless of the SET DATE setting) and nothing much more. But that's a pretty important fact!

I know of nothing better in VFP.

Cheers,
Jim N

>It would seem that in FoxPro 2.x the best way to index a table
>on a DATE field was to index on DTOS(Fieldname) as that
>created a character based index which proved to be much faster
>in operation than a date based index where, during comparison,
>dates had in any case to be converted internally to characters by FoxPro.
>
>My question is : does this still hold true in Visual FoxPro,
>or is there an even better way to have date-based indices in
>Visual FoxPro 5.
>
>Note : I could of course run some experiments, but by posting this
>question I am hoping someone else has already done the experiments.
>
>Much Thanks.
>Michel Creppy.