Hi Jerry, thanks for your response. Last month I applied your formula and I
tested it with a few examples, and it seemed fine so I didn't fully test it.
To belatedly answer your question:

a sequence of 10 9 10 -- count equals 1
a sequence of 10 9 8 -- count equals 3
my comment: yep

seems no way to get a sequence of 2...
my comment: yeah, I just noticed :)

I do not think the second column has to be handled a special case. I just
need to count consecutive improvements.

It's easy to do if you substitute "109" as "Yes" and "910" as "No". Then
you only have to count the number of consecutive "Yes." But the only way I
know how to do that is add "helper columns" -- see this for example:
http://www.microsoft.com/office/comm...=en-us&m=1&p=1

But I thought it would be great if it could be done within a single cell...

Thanks a lot for your time and advice... I've learned a lot over the past
few weeks... SteveC