Watch Richard's Replace Function Video https://599cd.com/blog/display-article.asp?ID=1083

John

Filter Characters
Code Vault:  Filter Characters w Replace

Yeah, that's exactly what I would do. I would strip out any non-numeric characters, store just the numbers in the field, run an update query on the existing data, and feed it through my filter function. Then, I would put an after-update event on that field so anytime new data is entered, it strips out everything but the numbers.

This is not a simple task due to the free-form nature of your data: phone number can have 10 digits, 7 digits, 6 digits, with or without dashes, spaces, or parentheses.  You could look for the last numeric character to see where the phone number ends and the description begins.  But what if the description has numeric data too: E.g. "123-456-7890 8am to 4pm work phone."  So it's tough to separate the phone# and the description.  My advice is to find a way to make all the phone numbers *uniform*: all 10 digits long, or all 12 characters long if you include two dashes, or 14 characters long if you want the (000) 000-0000 format.  Convert all the phone numbers to an identical format.  If they are missing area codes, fill them in.  Missing -, (, or ), fill them in.  Make them all look like (000) 000-0000, and you'll be sure the description starts at the 15th character onward.  A simple function most likely can't do this.  You need VBA to loop through all the phone numbers and convert them case by case:  If it's 000-0000, add area code; if its 000-000, add missing digit and area code; etc.  If there are other odd formats, you may have to edit them manually if VBA can't account for them all.