I have a table named Purchases

I have a table named PurchasePortal; it has only one field: Date, linked to the date field in Purchases

It has a portal which I want to use to filter purchases as of...date or between dates

When I enter a search criteria in the Date field I get an error message: "The value of this field must be a valid date in the range of years 1..4000 and should look like 12/25/2003"

I guess the problem is that I am not in the "find" mode???

Help is much appreciated

Right, you can't enter a range in a date field in browse mode.

What you can do is use two fields, start date and end date, and filter the portal using a relationship based on both fields (>=start and <= end).

I was afraid of that!

Thanks for the reply Fitch.

What you can do is use two fields, start date and end date

But you could make interpretation of such a string to fill some other fields in charge of the filtering!

--sd

True, but is there any advantage to the user or developer? You'd still need start and end date fields, plus a script and/or calc to parse the string, plus train users to enter the date range in a particular way.