After reading the comments on my problem of floats turned into factors i went back to my original file in Excell, save as csv, then reopen with a 'different' text editor to delete all spaces and now the files are read OK. I assume that when I stripped all the spaces from the file a funny character, non printable, crept in. Thanks to B.D.Ripley,M.Maechler,P.Dalgaard and T.Lumley for their comments. By the way I am using R1.2.1 on W98V2 R. Heberto Ghezzo Ph.D. Meakins-Christie Labs McGill University Montreal - Canada heberto at meakins.lan.mcgill.ca -.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.- r-help mailing list -- Read http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe" (in the "body", not the subject !) To: r-help-request at stat.math.ethz.ch _._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._