Hi Gene:
It looks like your   this.value  is a TYPE "C".
So if you concatenated both columns,  a + b, then took their combined length,
LEN( a + b ) you could immediately know if both were blank.  You could even
use LEN( ALLT(a) + ALLT(b) ) to further specify.  This assumes that each 
column could have more than 1 character in it.  Then you could test the
resultant calculation for each character, "1" - "5".  
Is this even close to what you had in mind?
David in Dallas.
--- Maximus/2 3.01
---------------