Hi Ron,

Thanks for your quick response. We are not allowed at work to download
programs onto our machines.

To confirm the three (sometimes more, sometimes less) development needs are
all within one cell howver for some reason they have loads of pspaces between
each one for example:

health and safety management fire training

instead of just being:

health and safety management fire training

I copied and pasted your formulas but i received a '#VALUE!' message when i
pressed Enter. The only way i can think of doing this is to enter a comma or
other symbol manually after each development need but as stated earlier i
have many rows of data.

I'm so fed up with this problem, if you could help further Ron i'd be very
grateful.

regards