I've forgotten the reason that the field is a character rather than a numeric.  
The original program was written for a Commodore 64.  I bought it from John for $35.  
It evolved to a lot more as it went through different programs and computers.
The first time it was re-written to a program called KnowledgeMan and ran on an IBM portable with a little amber screen.  Then I bought an IBM XT and after a time it was converted to dBaseii (or iii)  and then came FOX that I received from a company that I was programming for and finally FOXPRO.
I did write it with macro's that ran in Excel  and Lotus 123 but the person I wrote if for turned out to have a clone of Lotus 123 and the macro's wouldn't work.