Thank you Craig and Hilmar. I knew I'd hate myself. I had tried

STR({01/01/1990} - eff_date)

and I'm sure you know why that didn't work. I never thought of making the first date far into the future to avoid the problem of having negative numbers not sorting properly when you STR() them.

Sorry Hilmar but Craig beat you by almost two whole minutes, so he gets the extra stars.

...........Rich

>I know I'm missing something simple here and I'll hate myself when the solution gets posted but............
>
< SNIP >