Thanks for the reply. I really hadn't considered the RAND() issue, but
generally speaking, the formulas that are being frozen are wrappers for
queries into an accounting system. The creators of these sheets often
times have to send their results to people who do not have access to
the accounting system, so the values of the subexpressions in this
application are readily determinable.

I'm trying to avoid parsing strings altogether. That's what I'm doing
now. The problems with this methodology just seems to keep
snowballing. I want to know if there's a way to use Excels built-in
formula evaluations algoritims to solve this problem. I'm quite
certain that Excel does not parse strings to identify formulas in a
cell, but then again, I could be wrong.

I'm probably way out in left field here, but you never know!

Thanks for the quick response and excellent observations,
Johnny