Today I was tempted to take the time to go on a search mission to find my old Paradox floppies. Even old flat-file PCFile would have done the job in a trice. Microsoft Access is designed to keep people from using it. I suppose that, for flat-file purposes, just making tables in WinWord and using simple sorts on two or three columns will do the work that most people need. This was a sort of e-mail list that was presented in text form and not delimited in any way. I've really got to get to work on all this. Ughl.