5 Sooo..... if you stored this stuff on punched paper tape it would be long enough to stretch something like 10 times around the planet - unless those were binary orders of magnitude, in which case it would be a mere 1600 km long :). Heh, I *said* you must be working with relatively large amounts of relatively simple data, but I had no idea. (Don't tell me its relatively complex data... if it is then a 500 second saving would become insignificant next to the hours, days, weeks or whatever that your code would be spending "inside" the data rather than "in-between" it). Cheers Simon