Well Lowell, there must be, but I am more confused now than I was yesterday when I hit this issue. I am importing an excel file into table that is created during the import. I then try to load the data, which is nvarchar but I also tried as varchar, into another table where the column is decimal(3,1). Just to be certain I also tried "select convert (decimal(3,1), '1.2')" as a test. Allow I swear it failed yesterday, it is working fine now. As I said I am more confused now than before.