I doubt there is a way to do it without somehow using the keypress event to capture individual keystrokes. It doesn't need to be very complicated though. You only really need to worry about the keypress of the spacebar. If you just count the space keys, then you can add them to the normal "Len(AllTrim(text1.text))"

Alan

>Is it possible (without using keypress) to determine the # of characters (including trailing blanks) in a field?
>For example, I have a field in an form (no control source) that has an input mask of =replicate('X',30). If 'abc' or 'abc ' is input, the length of this.value is 30. If I check the length of the alltrim, it is 3, of course.
>Or to present the question another way ... How would I determine * exactly * what the user entered?
>TIA.