Ralph, thank you for posting your follow up message.  your original post described exactly the same issue i was having, and nothing out there on the net i came across...

thank you David!  i modified this to match what i'm doing and it worked perfect!  thank you very much again, this is a big weight lifted off my shoulders! 

all...

great.  thank you very much.  will try this one!

that could get me closer.  do you know how to do a length test on a text field? len(TextVariable) doesn't work.  ugh.

this way i could test them all and see...

thanks. i've done that actually, the only problem with that is about 5% of the rows have entries that exceed 8000 characters and they then get truncated.  pissed me off...