That works but returns an empty string for furi. My attempts to futz with the encoding properties of furi or the selected text (vbUnicode, etc.) have yielded nothing. Even when I specifiy a string, such as:

[vba]furi = xlApp.GetPhonetic("???") ' ??? because the VB editor doesn't support Unicode![/vba]
It returns nothing. The documentation for this method is terrible.