--- In IBObjects@y..., "rcmiszuk" <rcmiszuk@y...> wrote:

> Is the weakness in IBO or in Delphi? In looking through the Delphi
> help I haven't found anything to indicate how to do this either.

It's in Delphi VCL. Ibo inherist the edimask management from VCL, so the problem. My IB_Currency (did you tried it?) provides also "formatting while editing" capability, to reduce errors in entering currencies (you can use it also for float with the same of currency range and max 4 decimals, I suppose).
VCL lacks some basic functinoality for date entering too. Me I'm italian, and in italy our decimal separator is ',' (coma), while in the numeric keypad we have '.' (like in pocked calculators... or everything that comes from USA and is not localized...).
If I want to enter a decimal separator in VCL, I have to avoid the numeric keypad and find the coma key... so bad.
IBO has included this patch, so for me is much more usable.
About date, if you have a mask like !99/99/99, and the field has a value, if you delete it and leave the field VCL raises an error (it tries to convert '__/__/__' to a valid date), while IBO sets the field as null. The problem is here since Delphi 2 or before... never fixed. So IBO wins again against VCL.
If you are a good coder and IBO source expert, you could try to embed my control to a grid, or modify it to make it possible (as I stated, I don't know about that possibility). Jason will include your code for sure, while Borland will ignore the bug report and the patch forever... what a big difference!

>
> It seems like there would be a lot of demand for such functionality
> (ie. entering real numbers). I am certainly surprised.

I was too. (btw, when I used VB 4 it was really worse)

Regards
Marco Menardi