I was sitting, thinking, thinking too much about other things than doing my studies... I began pondering the formats of the various files of MS. The MS data format is a 'somehow' but natively readable format of date and OHLCV data, but not in any sort of database, rather individual files. The Downloader takes care of data formatting for exporting to other data files so I stopped thinking about this. When I run the system tester, the test itself and the results are stored in a Jet database, readable my Microsoft Access, so I stopped thinking about this. But what form do the .dta files take? When I export an indicator, expert etc it gets stored in a db, in a .dta file, but what type of db? Could I read the data in another application, like Access, Firefox, mySQL?? They are 'almost' readable in notepad. Just curious.... when I should be studying! wabbit :D