Well, I work for a McDonald's owner/operator with 47 stores. The guy who is over the IT department hired me to keep the office computers going(28 and counting) and write programs/scripts when needed. Recently, we needed to have hundreds of files culled out of thousands, formatted, and put into files easily readable by MS Access. To do so, I used perl, and my boss used access, which is ending up to be a wonderful match. Objectives for my code are initially just to Make It Work, then, after the deadline is met, I will optimize/comment/pretty it up a bit. nadadogg