At 02:25 PM 27/05/2004 +0100, you wrote:

>Thanks Daniel - I think I'm missing the pont here. I want to look at
>the data with a non-Delphi product and don't want to "lock" down the
>field to a definite sql query - I re-use queries at runtime and feed
>them with code, rather than having loads of them dotted around a
>datamodule.
>Second point - I want to query the data with PHP - again looking
>at "raw" data.
>Alan

But "raw" data displayed on a text device is just strings. If you don't
want to parse the output in your application, then probably your only
choice for this particular requirement is to use a UDF, such as f_dollarval
or f_fixedpoint (from FreeUDFLib).

/helen