I have a suprtool extract that extracts a numeric field into a display field
prior to importing into excel. the value in the field can be positive or
negative. when the value is negative the output has a trailing negative sign
eg 1654-.

the problem is that when import my extract file into excel, excel doesn't
recognise that these are negative numbers because it expects the negative
sign to be leading.

i've looked through the suprtool help to see if there was something like SET
SIGN=LEADING, but to no avail. does such a command exist or will i have to
define two more fields based on the display field and then do something
like:
DEF SIGN,QTY[8],1,BYTE
DEF NUM,QTY[1],7,BYTE
EXT SIGN,NUM

thanks in advance

martin