Rhino wrote:
Okay, now I'm officially baffled. :-)
....
I tried your suggestion just now and it worked perfectly.
....
The reason I'm baffled is that I tried the same formula - and umpteen
variations - yesterday and none of them worked correctly
....
I'm completely at a loss to understand
why none of this was working yesterday despite several hours of
experimentation and now works perfectly today.


My 2 cents worth: Apologies everyone for snipping this; the thread was
becoming unmanageable, and my comments do not really require the whole
context.

This problem of something working now that didn't work yesterday
'despite being keyed in exactly the same' is common. IMHO, you did not
key it in exactly the same. You probably made some subtle (or even
outrageous) mistake and read over it because we all see what we expect
to see. I've had the same experience countless times. My mosdt common
one was back in the DOS/Quickbasic programming days, when I got
continual errors which semed to go back each time to the darned machine
(it's always the machine - never the user) not recognising the perfectly
valid STRINGS keyword. When I came back to the problem the next day, I
would invariable immediately spot that it should be STRING$. So when
faced with something that doen't work, I often come back with a fresh
mind the next morning, have few glasses of wine, and solve it
immediately! (Only kidding about the few glasses of wine; that was last
night...)