>>Jim,
>>
>>"1 2 3" doesn't look like a number to me.
>>
>
>Sergey,
>
>Not to me either. But what Hans wanted was to find out whether or not the user entered just numbers in his character field. He already knew the type of the data was character.

No, he wanted to know if user entered a number or character expression. Your code would return type "N" for "1 2 3" but VAL("1 2 3") returns 1.00 which is incorrect.