>is there a way to tie a textbox and or make a textbox a date data type because i am having problems passing the data from one box to the nextbecause one is binded to a feild that is a date data type and the other is just a string i triend ctod() before i passed it and the box will not hold the value i cannot seem to get it to work right is there a way to make the other box a date data type by default?

Make sure your controlsource is correct. A textbox does not have a data type per say but it's controlsource does. If you are trying to programatically set a textbox to a date that is the value of another, the datatype of the control source needs to be a date. I'm not sure if you had a typo but you should be using a dtoc() instead. Play around with the function in the command window.