loopy indeed. didn't think there was a VBA method to count a specific character... for this same effort, more or less, one really might be better off building a normalized 'child' relational table - using a variation of this logic to write out the string into records with a cross reference key back to the main table.... that sort of depends on whether there is new data being made constantly in this text mode or whether this is a 1 time effort to set up a new db from an import or something.