>Irv,
>
>
>I was about to say the same as Borislav, I do no see that behaviour, I even tried setting a property to -214709043200000000000000000000 in the property sheet and it works just fine (set a textbox with controlsource = thisform.tag, which has that big value)
>
>
>[Update]Oops
>
>Is stored as Character, please gently disregard my message <g>
>
>[Update]OK
>I tried with a new property and it works well for -2147090432, the big number I posted before is converted to -2.1470904320000E+29, still no stars

This ended out to be my fault. The value was stored correctly in the property, but I extracted it for viewing and SQL storage using Transform(), and STR() without a second parm. Transform() has an issue with large negative numbers (from the help), and STR() limits to a length of 10 if you don't use a second parameter.

Thanks for your help,