I have a minute problem that is a huge headache. I have tried for hours and can't fix it. I designed a report that has a "date field" in it. The dates with one digit in the day or month, don't line up with the dates with 2 digits in the day or month. This is because their is a blank space in place of the second digit in the dates with only one digit in the day or month. I have determined that the problem is that an input mask was used by the person who downloaded my info that automatically puts in the blank space. But I don't want the input mask anymore because the dates do notline up properly. So I have gone back into table view and removed the input mask but it doesn't affect the dates in the report. They still don't line up. New dates that I input now without the Input Mask line up properly, but no matter what I do I can't get the older dates to line up. It's driving me nuts. Any suggestions?

How are they formatted?

Rich. Thanks. They are fomatted as Date/Currency and then they were formatted with an input mask of a "short date" with # as the place holder. It says that the # leaves a blank space where there is no digit. __/__/__. And that's exactly what it does. I have since removed the input mask, but as I said can't get it to change the formatting of the thousands of dates that are already in there. As I said, now that I have removed the input mask, new dates are fine. But no matter what I do I can't change the format of the old ones!?

As an example. Dates look like this 2 / 6/02
and 12/14/02, so they don't line up and look crummy on a report.

You can specify your own format for the date field so that each component part is formatted with two digits. There is NO way to align them if you are unwilling to see leading zeros.

Format(yourDateField,"mm/dd/yy")

The standard format is "m/d/yy" which shows 1 or 2 characters for the month and day fields and two characters for the year field.

Thanks for the info Pat. Turns out what my problem was, is that I kept trying to affect how the date looked in my report by making adjustments in Table View formatting of the Record source I was using for the Report. Well, of course, the changes I made to formating in table view only affected my dataview, NOT my reports. So, I went into design view for my REPORT (incidentally, I had tried this earlier today but somehow missed it), selected the field with the date I wanted to re-format, and their was the
!*&%#!Input Mask that caused me about 4 hours of gnashing my teeth and pulling my hair out. (Yes, I'm a perfectionist). I deleted the input mask and inserted, in the format window, as you suggested, the
mm/dd/yy format. I can accept the lead "0" and now everything lines up perfectly. I am going to bed now, a happy Access camper. I am SOOOOOO glad I found this site and people like you. Thanks!