Ah, I thought I saw some spaces in your example. Four characters, can't go shorter.

Yes, the value per character is very subtle... on my keyboard, the slash is on shift+7, so for me it's one shift less, plus it looks like a much nicer, high-brow smiley... :)

Aren't we a nitpicking lazy bunch?

>I didn't know you could do it that way, thanks. However, as to it's shortness, it still appears to have a character length of 4. <g>
>
>>>Not in SQL Server, NULL is as close as you can get with either datetime or smalldatetime. SQL Server doesn't have anything like VFP's {/:} (empty datetime).
>>
>>Try

{ :}

. That's even shorter :).