1) Use an unbound input character based control and in the lost focus, validate and replace your date field.

2) Overlay two controls, one for display (unbound character) and one for input (bound date). In the got and lost focus events make the the appriate ones visible/invisible.

>When I'm displaying fields that contain empty dates, I don't want to show the date separator lines. Is there any easy way of hiding them? (VFP6)
>
>Thanks,
>Elyse