Hello Bonny, thanks for your reply, I thought the same thing ( varchar = no spaces ) but !!!, I was asked recently to restrict the amount of characters users could enter into textboxes to the length of the underlying field, no problem thought I!, simply set the MaxLength property of the textbox to n, on testing I noticed I couldn't enter any text unless I cursored to the end of the text and held down the delete key thus removing the trailing spaces, I now use rtrim in my stored procs which will suffice until I think of something, thanks again