I think you could do all of that with the technique that I described Ron.
The button could issue the first OnTime macro, loading the cell could stop
it, and the button could restart (and clear the cell)

--

HTH

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


"Ron" wrote in message
...
Bob,

Thanks for that, I've previously used (and am grateful for) Chips article
about OnTime. Here I want the sheet to start qurying at the hit of a
button, and when a situation is indicated I want to be able to 'turn off'
for a varying period of time which depends on how long it takes me to
complete the next task, which is a manual thing.

Ron


"Bob Phillips" wrote in
:

You could use OntIme to schedule it to run at a given time, and then
each time fire it off 2 minutes later. Within that routine, you could
test a worksheet cell, and if a certain value, then just abort. You
just set that cell when you want to abort.

Chip has a good page about OnTime at
http://www.cpearson.com/excel/ontime.htm