>>This is how text looks before I assing the value (I set utf8 property to 1 using comprop) - see attached.
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>(1) If your windows is not set to cyrillic, I do not think that you can use a messagebox to display cyrillic
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If I don't apply comprop(this.object, 'UT8',1), I get back (in the messagebox) all ???. If I apply that, I can get some characters back in the messagebox.

>(2) Try to get the value back from the ms forms textbox, just assign it and get it back
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?? How? E.g. assign value of the control.text? And to what? To the variable?

>(3) how do you get to the new value ? It should be the same as the old value if you did not edit it

If I don't edit it and don't re-save, it remains the same. If I copy text 'Russian' from one textbox to another and attempt

replace myField with this.text

or replace myField with createbinary(this.text)

or any strconv before createbinary or anything else I can think of, I can not get back the same 4 bytes per character as original and so I always end up with something different as my final result.