Thanks for your replies Mel, Darrel. It has been mostly your own posts that I have been poring over to find a solution to my problem. Updating the main chip may be a possibility or I may have to just learn my lesson and get that stuff for the next project. My friend and I have already bought all the pieces for the current project, including the EEPROM chips so I figure I'll try and use them.

Mel I think I may have been confusing the MPLAB IDE with MPASM so maybe the eeprom vars file will work for me.

It's a shame though that using the onchip eeprom has all those nice data and eeprom statements and using the external one means I have to write code like that listed here to populate arrays so that I can write data to the external eeprom a page at a time.