Jim wrote...

> ... my list of suggested data type fields was USA centric.  Guilty.

Ok. Sentenced to read five off-topic postings *before* deleting them.

:-) ;-) :-)

> ... I do think
>that HP should look at providing intrinsics to make editing data like
dates as
>consistent and easy as possible.  And in the case of dates HP as responded.

A concept like "user exits" might provide flexible data validation or
pre-/post-processing for DBGET/DBPUT/DBUPDATE intrinsics. But this could
also open a can of worms in terms of complexity and robustness...

On the other hand, nobody would have to wait for HP to implement such a
feature. As far as I recall, there are already a couple of people/products
using an "intercept" approach with Image Intrinsic "look alikes" in some
user level NMXL or NMRL that call XL.PUB.SYS internally.

Lars.