fred thank you...this is the cituation
a harris pbx thows information into my database..
my field is a character field
and it comes like this 990501
i used substr(view2.answertime,1,2) + ":" + substr(view2.answertime,3,2) to format it into 05/01/99 still in characters...
the question is how do i formate it into May-05-99 instead.....