Formatting

Hello all, I have a strange problem that i need some advice on. I have the following field called FILENO. It is a SQL 2000 field with the Data Type set to Char (7). The following sql statement works perfectly: SELECT TOP 1 RTRIM(FILENO) AS TEST, RIGHT(DATEPART(Yy, FILENOYEAR), 2) AS YEAR FROM tblRecords WHERE RIGHT(DATEPART(Yy, FILENOYEAR), 2) = '05' ORDER BY FILENO DESC It returns the correct data, 0050. Now, what i'm trying to do is add 1 to the value so i can get the next available number which is 0051. But, when i run the following sql statement, i get 51 instead of 0051. SELECT TOP 1 RTRIM(FILENO+1) AS TEST, RIGHT(DATEPART(Yy, FILENOYEAR), 2) AS YEAR FROM tblRecords WHERE RIGHT(DATEPART(Yy, FILENOYEAR), 2) = '05' ORDER BY FILENO DESC Does anyone have an idea how to solve this? Thanks. Richard M.

do you convert it to Char(7) after you add 1 ... so that will reformat it to the char rather than integer