>Hope you caught my reply about FILTER doing me in. I do agree about making this uneditable for an existing record, and will change it accordingly. Are you saying I only need "!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" in the Format property? And blow away the Input Mask? I still need to allow anything, including 0-9, - , *, etc. This input and display formatting has always been a confusing issue for me since the 2.X days. The Help and the Hacker's Guide aren't very informative either. I seem to get a solution that works only through a lot of trial and error. Thanks again.
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No, in the InputMask; there's no need for a separate format to get the uppercase character functionality, and there are no character restrictions "X" vs "!" in the InputMask.

MaxLength set to 15, InputMask set to =REPL('!',15), Value set to =SPACE(15) if not bound to a field which would init it IAC.

It's worked this way since the InputMask and Format were distinguishable - prior to VFP, InputMask was the PICTURE clause of an @...whatever; InputMask specifies character by character behavior, while Format specifies behavior for the entirety of the item.