could it be that im doing this in a sub and not a module? Im new to VBA
and dont understand about variables and suchlike, I only know by
finding out what works and what doesnt!

I have tried putting option explicit in one of my modules which holds
the functions that i use but your comment made me think that perhaps i
have structured it wrong to start with? The selection.find activates
when a button is pressed on a form, this is within the sub which also
goes on to do all the rest of the code.

This is giving me a headache, I think perhaps i should have defined the
parameters of the find within a module and called the find from the
sub, trouble is it worked fine until ive started to add extra
functionality to this project (i.e extra sheets which are used as
templates for a print command upon submission of data) and its all
started to unravel, once you get this far in its hard to start again
from scratch!