I used to do what you are doing, but then when I ported my application to the web, and fun things like format codes were not aval, I came up with a differnt approach. that is writing a function, which both sripts out all the .'-() etc, from the field, and store just numbers in the table,

Then whenever I display the contents of the phone - fax cell field on a form, report, or anthing I use the wrapper again, to format it out properly,- that way,if one day, I want to make it international, or change the formatting, to be 999.999.9999 it would be a matter of changing one line of code.
Bob Lee