"Erasmus" wrote in message
Thanks, got that working fine - although where does the debug thing
show up?

On the VBE's main menu, View, Immediate Window, or simply Ctrl-g

I use progress bar to get a rough idea as these sheets take
so long to calculate anyway.

Fair enough

If we don't know where they're at, half
the time we crash the macro (or completely shut excel if it's just
calculating the whole sheet).

That can't be right at all

In answer to your question tho - there may be sections that we want to
pull through without having to wait ages for the rest of the sheet to
update. As an idea, the sheet I'm currently pulling in (one of a few
in this wb & many wb's) has 31,325 numbers to pull in from 4 temporary
files. And the calculations are pretty slow as it's opening dbf files
to find the results we need.

Wouldn't Automatic calculation work OK for your needs.

Regards,
Peter T