Thank you Bob and Dave. Just what I needed.

Dave, the reason I didn't use the following structure ....

if activechart is nothing then
'do it's nothing stuff
else
'do if it's "something" stuff
end if

..... is that the 'nothing stuff' is many lines of code
while the 'something stuff' is zero lines. That makes
the If-Then-Else statement really hard to read!

Art