a very generous offer Marcia - you do realize i'm a newbie at this. my basic training was in borland DBase from there on to VFP-9 i have been relying on codes provided by patient and generous experts in the field. With that in mind let me know if the offer still applies and i will send you my questions - feel free to decline.

Just post your questions here on the UT. That way everyone benefits from the exchange of ideas <s>.

Having said that, a good place for you to start would be with the topic on the visual class designer in the VFP help file. What you are going to have to do is to create your own custom text box class based on the code I send you and copy and paste the code in between the PROCEDURE,,,ENDPRC keywords into custom methods that you add to your custom textbox class. You will also need to add some custom properties to this class:

*-- Sets the 'base' century to be used for date display. Two digits only
ncentury = 19
*-- The year to be used for RollOver to the next century. Two digits
nrollyear = 45
*-- Formatted character string used to save/restore default settings by the Set/Rest Cent methods
ccentwas = ""

And set some native properties:

Alignment = 3
Value = {}
Format = "YL"
Width = 120
Name = "txtdate"

Have fun!