Bob,

Thanks very much for this. Having tried out your advice I see that the 1 in
brackets indicates the order in which the shapes were placed on the
worksheet? If I ran the code to change the shape names, would the name
changes be saved with the workbook or would I have to reassign each on Open
or something similar?

Thanks again

John
"Bob Phillips" wrote in message
...
John,

You can either do it by selecting the shape on the worksheet and changing
the name in the Names box, or with VBA

activesheet.shapes(1).name="Bob"

--

HTH

RP
(remove nothere from the email address if mailing direct)


"John" wrote in message
...
Hi there,

Can anyone tell me how you can name shapes in excel, so that you can then
reference them programatically?

I'd like to include a number of small circles that change from red to
green
on a given condition. At the moment I can only do this using the
Selection
method, which I want to avoid.

Thanks

John