Hi Shjerpe,

the previous post locked me out as my keyboard had an issue and replied many many time.

In Excel it comes back in alphabetical oder.

Much to my complete disbelief as initially I am certain that I ticked off every column left to right against what I saw in my cobol code that uses the xfd.

Suddenly the next day its alpha, but at least I got all the columns I believe even though it mentioned truncation (I couldn't see any)

MS Access is listing in the correct order but is limited to 256 columns and I have over 1000

I have rebooted, restarted trying to get back.  I will say it seems to be doing a "preview" that I don't recall it doing first time around.