<< I will look into Karen's suggestion about cursoring the system table. That should work well. As long as I Detach the table each time, the column structure should update on the next SAttach. >>
You can import an XLS of unknown number of columns using GATEWAY XLS FileName.XLS CREATE TableName This doesn't require SATTACH and SDETACH (which, for some reason, always make me nervous). With this technique, the items numbers are in the first row of data. The column names are predictable (CELL_A, CELL_B, and so on), so you can "walk" the columns yourself (or continue to use the SYS_COLUMNS and SYS_TABLES approach). -- Larry
