Thanks for the reply, Ace. You're always very helpful on these forums. Nevertheless, I'm about to provide a weird update. I ended up speaking with our phone vendor who has remote access to our system and funny enough he was able to add commas/periods to those fields on his end. I confirmed that he is using the same DB version as us. But neither myself nor my fellow coworker can add them. However, our vendor provided a workaround for me which did work. While in DB Programming, I went to View and enabled On-Line Monitor (which I've used before for other stuff), and then I was able to add commas/periods to the fields. He stated that it might be an issue due to a Windows Update or something, but for now that workaround will suffice.
Any explanation for that? Because I'm pretty confused at this point, lol. I assumed it was an intended change by Mitel with the new version upgrade and then that excerpt in the help article about the control characters - something that you seemed to confirm, but now I have my phone vendor saying they still work for him, and then shows me a way to change them via on-line monitor. Gotta love technology..