Sergey,

I know what you mean. I think is would be helpfull if I explain the purpose of the textbox (as Nadya asked):

The textbox is part of a class that is used to do simple querying on a table. The value of the textbox is used in a the where clause of the query, so determening on the type of data in the textbox my where clause changes

if input is date: where dDate=textbox.value
if input is numeric: where nExpression=textbox.value
if input is character: ... where cExpression=textbox.value

That's why it is important to know the correct type of data. I checked if anything is done with the entered value, but I can't find anything, so I found it very strange that the type() function returns 'U' for character input.