Dear Claus Busch,
Thank you, yes that must have been what was wrong with the program, as it runs now, although it doesn't do much really - just outputs the inputter's name and date of birth and a few zeroes to the worksheet, which is nothing like as elaborate as the output he suggests would be generated by the program on page 47.
Leaving 'VBA for absolute beginners' to one side, for the moment, I wanted to ask if you know anything much about using Visual Basic for Webscraping ? I wanted to access the internet to download specific information, not just the xml of a homepage but items that will fall within specific tags, but which will vary on a day to day basis, originally I was going to try this in Python, but the actual software of Excel/ Visual Basic seems more suited to accessing and scraping the internet, if you know what you are doing. I have looked at quite a few 'You Tube' s on the subject, but so far I can't find one that uses code that will search for and download specific information.I don't know if you can help, but thank you for reading anyhow.
Yours
Simon Evans.