>>How did you find that out?

>How did I found out? I don't know, I knew it for a long time I didn't even think how I happened to learn it:) Actually I have posted another version of that code years ago:
>Re: Drill down in excel Thread #1031781 Message #1032103
>
>Looking at title and your "drill down" I see that my main problem was in understanding what you want:)
>
>PS: It is PasteSpecial doing the job by the way. I read the documentation once upon a time and as I remember you could paste everyting, just values etc.
>Cetin

Ok, a few problems:

1) A customer's ID is "138" because the client's name is "Bodega 138". (Notice how old fashioned DacEasy accounting is that it doesn't use meaningless numeric PK's). Excel looks at "138" and interprets it as a numeric 138. Not so bad, just format column as Text. Fine if you are not doing anything else with the spreadsheet.

2) A salesperson's ID is "MAR1" because his last name is "Marin". Excel looks at "MAR1" and thinks it means March 1. Here forrmating the column as Text renders March 1 as number 40238 so we need another approach. I tried TYPE DELIMITED WITH TAB which places the string in quotes, with same results. If it was just this case we could do search and replace in Excel but we need a generic solution.

The problems originate because PasteSpecial makes mistakes while interpreting the pasted string of characters. If we could make it accept a piece of string literally!

Any suggestions?

TIA,

Alex