Thanks for the kind words. I'm in the process of building a utility that will read the file and do a sample "load" based on the format file. I thought about using xp_cmdshell to do this but decided against it in favor of the utility. Some of my reasons for this are:
* some/many admins don't permit the use of xp_cmdshell
* it would require a table to load the header row (another dependency)
Both of those are overcome by using a stand alone application.
--Paul Hunter