take the quotes off the ends

=RIGHT(TEXT(A1, "0000000"), 7)

Sorry I forgot to put this after the exec statement

print @theoutput

I don't get the stuff in the messages tab that you do but the print statement will return the output...

To narrow this down..

can you create this procedure

create procedure dbo.stp_testovlimit

@myinput varchar(50),

@myoutput varchar(50)output

as

select @myoutput = @myinput

select @myinput

--and run this

begin

declare @theoutput varchar(50)

exec stp_testovlimit 'The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy...

wasn't this part of the SP

SELECT ISNULL(Description, '') AS Description

FROM JudicialServicesPersonnelTypes

WHERE PersonnelType = @PersonnelType

and returned the whole value? Is this just happenning with output variables?

ok so what version of SQL (7 or 2000) what is the OS and waht are the SPs for both?

I added 2 ENDs

one right before the ELSE and one at the very end.

I tried to space it out so it was legible but the spaces got removed from the...

Why wouldn't you use join synatx?

Every Begin needs and END

If (expr goes here)

BEGIN

WHILE Var1 < Var2

...

Just for S&G what happends if you declare the output as char(100) instead of char(50)?

usually this is caused by an errant space in the cell.

First you can try trimming the data before you cast it.

To find the row with the issue try...

In QA under Tools-ptions-results, what is your max characters per column set at?

If you run

select 'Retired Supreme Court Associate Justice'

what do you get?

Matt- At one point in time the table allowed for a formatted phone number xxx-xxx-xxxx. It is not used so I think could change it to char(10) or numeric....

Sergiy, I looked up hash joins in BOL and while there were good descriptions there were no examples. I did write a version of the query that got rid...

I'm not sure I explained the process well since I started with an abstract question and now we are moving to my specific issue. Here we go.

We have a...

The DNC comes as a flat text file of telephone numbers. We have to match it up against our database of customers and mark them as unable to call...