I am using Excel 2002. For my application I want to insert pictures in
various cells, then write formulae in other cells that take different
actions based on what is in the pictures. The pictures are small .bmp
files that I coded to represent various symbols. A worksheet function that
takes a cell reference as argument and returns the pathname of the .bmp file
would be sufficient to solve my problem, but worksheet functions like CELL
dont know anything about this.

I'm hoping the answer will not be "you can't do this because the picture is
not bound to the cell in a way that would support this function". (I
suppose if picture cells can be sorted there is some hope.) If it is
possible to write a VB function to do this, I'm not experienced in such
exercises and would appreciate fairly explicit instructions for setting this
up.

Using a custom font to represent the symbols instead of inserting pictures
might be a more natural way of solving the problem, but I am not au fait
with doing this. None of the predefined fonts have the symbols that I need,
or anything close enough to serve effectively as an approximation. (For
those who are curious to know, the symbols in my application represent
components of a railway signalling diagram.)

Any advice appreciated. TIA.

Jeff