Thank you Si
That was very good info. Much better then what I have receive in the past. My employer wanted to use excel because of data corruption in the past where data was lost. So instead of building one large data base, I have each of the customers orders in it own excel spread sheet that is saved to their individual folder. Then I have a small data base of the file locations. If there is a corruption it will only effect one excel file and not the whole database. Also each file can be read outside my program. It is also easier for archiving and the program will be as fast in 2 years as it is today when it's new. I was told VB2010 is much better with databases. I need this one on line now but plan to rewrite in in 2010 at a later date. Maybe 2 years when the upgrade will be necessary. Again thank you for the explanation. To many so called programmers have lots of smart a** advice but can't give you an answer to your question. You spelled it out nicely.