I have prowled the net with yahoo looking for a suitable symbol font, and
concluded that it would be more practicable to try and create one. I'm
currently investigating an evaluation copy of High-Logic Font Creator, which
appears promising. I need to spend some time setting up the font glyphs,
but this does not appear to be much more labour intensive than creating
bitmaps in Paint. I lose the option of multi-colour symbols (not greatly
concerned by that), but a font seems to be easier to use in my application
(see Tom's post).

Thanks to all respondents.

"Ken Wright" wrote in message
...
Can you point us in the direction of what the symbols look like - perhaps
a
rail site somewhere. Just thinking it will be far easier to do this if we
can point you in the direction of a font symbol as you mentioned. There
are
thousands of them.

--
Regards
Ken....................... Microsoft MVP - Excel
Sys Spec - Win XP Pro / XL 97/00/02/03

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It's easier to beg forgiveness than ask permission :-)
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"Jeff Melvaine" wrote in message
...
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