Thanks Juan.

In testing (2002) I just noticed that my validation would result in an error if the name of my range (whichever was used in the validation) did not start with a capital letter. Is this common? I used a named range 'countries', which evaluated to an error; then I used 'Countries' and it worked just fine. Is this my problem do you think?

Btw, it works wonderfully Juan. That is a very nice alternative.