>How about playing some games with DynamicCurrentControl with the appropriate "data" put in the "blank" control?

Hi Bill - Josh suggested that, too, and I imagine it would work...but I've already gotten pretty far along using an SQL cursor with

iif(empty(mydate),space(8),dtoc(mydate)) as mychardate

for each date field in the table. And, I can use the same cursor for the report I was slaving over yesterday with a related date format problem. If I'd known about this problem yesterday, then I wouldn't have had that problem. Oh well :)