I noticed that alot of my doc data are ints & floats, which I have to convert to strings when using many of the controls . . . so wouldn't it be better to just declare them as CStrings or regular strings since my conversions to ints & floats would be less than my conversions to strings? Hope this makes sense. Guess I would like to have some kind of rule on deciding what types to declare the data in doc (which will be persistant. Thanks for anyone's input!