If you do ?read.table
you would most likely find the answer on your own. Have a look at the description of the as.is and colClasses argument. The column sn.rnc has been automatically recognised as being numeric. After Df1<-read.table("Dbfile",colClasses="character",header=TRUE) you will see 50.20 in the column "sn.rnc". But beware: that column now has class "character" and NOT "numeric". Do class[Df1[,"sn.rnc"]) to see for yourself. Berend -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/need-help-tp19230876p19231149.html Sent from the R help mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.