thanks for your help, It worked just fine.

i think that the problem getting the wanted reply on typename(ctl) was
that it was requiring "ComboBox" not "combobox".

now i am on to a new problem. The for loop is iterating through my
comboboxes and writing the values back to the spreadsheet, but
apparently the order is messed up. Is there a way for me to reset the
order. taking a stab in the dark, i would say i have to reset
controls.item(indexnumber) to get them in the right order, but i am not
sure how or where to do this. this is something different than the
index of the combobox, it is its index number within the controls
collection. I am guessing that it is a reflection of the order in
which the controls were created.

anyway thanks again for any help you can provide.