I havent tried this yet but it sort of just hit me in the face... as stated by Gaffer the TransferText function when dealing with data automates the type determination when it reads the first bit of data... so I thought how about adding in a dummy record, after the record that distinguishes the DB field, at the beginning of the text file to set the type conversion!

Of course im only doing this cos I want to do it all in code rather than Access

Anyway suggestions would be good but thats mine

Cheers
B.