> Tamar, It was your book that allowed me to start automating excel. I am using different tabs and procedures because I use one procedure to, for instance, make one histogram showing numbers of A', the same procedure to make a pivot table, showing the # of A's per year, etc. What do you mean, where is it in your book, when you tablk about using a property of either a dedicated automation object or the application object. I missed this part, somehow. But your book is in front of me.
>

This paragraph is near the end of the Introduction:

"For larger examples, we had to make a choice. In real applications, you almost always want to open the Automation server, do what needs to be done, and close the server. In that situation, you can use a local variable to hold the reference to the server. For our purposes, however, we usually want the server to stay open and accessible following the example so that you can examine the results and reference the server from the Command Window. However, we didn’t want to leave multiple instances of the servers running, abandoned and using your system resources. So most of the examples that are included in the Developer Downloads clear any variables that might be references to Automation objects, and then create a public variable to reference the server. We do not recommend using this technique in your applications."

And most of the examples that declare a public variable, include a comment about it being for demo purposes. In addition, Chapter 15 talks about building a class to wrap the servers and shows how to set up the reference in a property.

Tamar