>I tried your suggestion, but couldn't get it to work. I got the "-" sign in front of the number instead of the paren -- I'm not sure I want to go through all these conversions to the number for the alignment. There has to be an easier way!
>
>Thanks again for your suggestion.
>Doug

Sorry. In Courier New, the paren takes up 1 space, so this should work:

iif(field1 < 0, "(" + padl(abs(field1), 10, " ") + ")", padl(field1, 11, " "))