Sam,

Thanks for your reply. I'm afraid the class approach is a little over my head. Taking baby steps with Excel:

As for your: "The only other way I can see to speed this up is to first check the string for any FontStyle NOT regular and only then send the cell for full processing."

Sounds promising, but how? Also there is the matter of the line breaks. I think If Instr(oCell.Value, Chr(10)) > 0 would work send to processing any cell with line breaks but how would I determine if a cell was or was not all normal text?